2023 capped off hottest decade on record

DE Online Desk
Global heat records were “smashed” last year, the UN confirmed on Tuesday, with 2023 rounding out the hottest decade on record, as heatwaves stalked oceans and glaciers suffered record ice loss.
The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) issued its annual State of the Climate report, confirming preliminary data indicating that 2023 was by far the hottest year ever recorded. And it came at the end of “the warmest 10-year period on record,” the WMO report said, reports AFP.
UN chief Antonio Guterres said the report showed “a planet on the brink.” “Earth’s issuing a distress call,” he said, pointing out that “fossil fuel pollution is sending climate chaos off the charts,” and warning that “changes are speeding up.” The WMO said the average near-surface temperature was 1.45°C above pre-industrial levels last year — dangerously close to the critical 1.5°C threshold that countries agreed to avoid passing in the 2015 Paris climate accords.
“Never have we been so close… to the 1.5°C lower limit of the Paris Agreement,” WMO chief Andrea Celeste Saulo warned in a statement. The report, she said, should be seen as a “red alert to the world.” Going through the data, the organisation found that “records were once again broken, and in some cases smashed,” warning that the numbers “gave ominous new significance to the phrase ‘off the charts’.” Saulo stressed that climate change was about much more than temperatures.
“What we witnessed in 2023, especially with the unprecedented ocean warmth, glacier retreat and Antarctic sea ice loss, is cause for particular concern.”
One especially worrying finding was that marine heatwaves gripped nearly a third of the global ocean on an average day last year. And by the end of 2023, more than 90% of the ocean had experienced heatwave conditions at some point during the year, the WMO said. More frequent and intense marine heatwaves will have “profound negative repercussions for marine ecosystems and coral reefs,” it warned.
At the same time, it warned that key glaciers worldwide suffered the largest loss of ice ever since records began in 1950, “driven by extreme melt in both western North America and Europe.”