The 2023 heat spike: apocalyptic or unusual?
The Observatory
2 Apr
Dr David Whitehouse
The Global Heat Anomaly 2023
Many climate scientists are very worried about the global heat anomaly seen in 2023, and for varying reasons. No single year has confounded their predictive capabilities more than 2023. They didn’t see it coming, but perhaps they were looking in the wrong direction?
Writing in the journal Nature, Gavin Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Science says that:
“[the] temperature anomaly has come out of the blue, revealing an unprecedented knowledge gap perhaps for the first time since about 40 years ago, when satellite data began offering modellers an unparalleled, real-time view of Earth’s climate system.”
For the past nine months, average land and sea surface temperatures have exceeded records each month, sometimes by up to 0.2°C. This global heat event exceeds greatly forecasts by climate models. At the start of 2023, modellers put the chance of it being a record warm year at 20%, although this was actually just an educated guess. So from one point of view, 2023 has been a disaster for climate modelling. Many explanations have been proposed, but so far none of them – singly or in combination – can explain what happened. It wasn’t due to the El Niño, an upturn in oceanic temperature cycles, increased solar activity, or the reduction in aerosol shielding due to cleaner shipping fuels.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/2023-heat-spike-assessment
