Last year, the planet experienced its hottest year on record. While it wasn’t entirely a surprise that 2023 could top the previous hottest year — 2016 — in light of ongoing greenhouse gas emissions, what did come as a surprise was by how much.
One of the contributing factors to that extreme warmth was El Niño, a natural, cyclical warming in a region of the Pacific Ocean that, coupled with the atmosphere, can cause global temperatures to rise. Last year, it began in June.
Typically, the global atmosphere responds to El Niño in the subsequent year, which begs the question: Could 2024 be even hotter than 2023?
“Basing it on the El Niño at the beginning of the year, and then seeing how things are working out this year, it suggests that 2024 is going to be almost the same as 2023,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
But there are a lot of other things to take into account, he said.
