Another year, another record. Recent news headlines seem to support the adage that records are made to be broken.
Yet while records are usually positive news in sport or the business world, they serve as grim reminders in the context of climate change, where unprecedented highs are best avoided and are also avoidable.
This month, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) confirmed that 2023 was the hottest year on record by a large margin and was probably the warmest in the past 100,000 years. Daily global temperature averages even briefly surpassed pre-industrial levels by more than 2 degrees Celsius, the upper limit set in the Paris Agreement.
In 2023, all-time highs were also reached for atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane, along with global average sea-surface temperatures, while Antarctic sea ice levels set new lows, according to C3S, part of the European Union’s Earth observation programme.
These records are yet another signal that humanity is increasingly living beyond the Earth’s environmental limits and needs to take action to reverse the warming process.
