Wood Romances

Most of the GMST temperature data is in for 2023, and it was a doozy. Around June 1, GMST headed into unchartered territory, and they stayed there for the rest of the year, with only a few days not record temperatures for the instrumental record. Now with the the availability of daily reanalysis data, it's been possible to track this on a near daily basis.  ClimateReanalyzer data for 2023 from ERA5 At the end of 2022, even with the likelihood that El Niño conditions would develop, most thought that there would be a low probability that 2023 would be a record year, beating 2016/2020, as you can see from this graph by Zeke Hausfather. 2023 came in significantly warmer than the range expected at the beginning of the year. When large El Niños developed in 1997 and 2015, it was the following year that became record years, and there's good reason to think this pattern would continue, though since scientists don't know exactly why 2023 was so warm, we should perhaps take that expe...

  Now that 2023 is in the books, it's pretty clear that all global temperature datasets will show 2023 to be the warmest year on record by a significant margin. And since 21st century has exceeded the warmest temperatures of the Holocene (the current interglacial), it's also fair to say that 2023 has likely been the warmest year at least since the last interglacial ended 125K years ago. I'm going to wait until all the major datasets are updated to 2023 before saying more about 2023. But already the dishonesty from contrarians is coming out to spin 2023 into something other than what it actually was. Patrick Moore's Dishonesty Patrick Moore posted a tweet with the above graph claiming that what I summarized about 2023 above is an "outright lie." His words: The claim is being made that “2023 was the hottest year in 125,000 years”. This is an outright lie. The Holocene Climatic Optimum from about 10,000-5,000 years ago, when the Sahara was green, was warmer than...

 We're now just past half way through 2023. At the beginning of the year, it was expected that there was a good likelihood that we would transition into El Niño conditions sometime in the Spring or Summer, and this might lead to a new record high GMST in 2024, with a small chance of this happening in 2023. However, with developments occurring over the last couple months, all that has changed. On Twitter, Zeke Hausfather provided data from Berkeley Earth that, barring some event like a large volcanic eruption, there is an  81% chance  that 2023 would beat out 2016/2020 as the warmest year on record. In fact, the year-to-date average already surpasses 2020, and there's a small potential that this year could be the first year to hit the +1.5 ° C above the 1850-1900 mean. Hitting 1.5 ° C would not mean that we have missed the IPCC target of 1.5 ° C, since that target is built on the 30-year average, not a single year. But what changed from the beginning of the year ...