{"id":68049,"date":"2024-05-14T13:41:52","date_gmt":"2024-05-14T18:41:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=68049"},"modified":"2024-05-14T13:41:52","modified_gmt":"2024-05-14T18:41:52","slug":"climate-models-cant-explain-2023s-huge-heat-anomaly-we-could-be-in-uncharted-territory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=68049","title":{"rendered":"Climate models can\u2019t explain 2023\u2019s huge heat anomaly \u2014 we could be in uncharted territory"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Climate models can\u2019t explain 2023\u2019s huge heat anomaly \u2014 we could be in uncharted territory<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Taking into account all known factors, the planet warmed 0.2 \u00b0C more last year than climate scientists expected. More and better data are urgently needed.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n
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When I took over as the director of NASA\u2019s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I inherited a project that tracks temperature changes since 1880. Using this trove of data, I\u2019ve made climate predictions at the start of every year since 2016. It\u2019s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists\u2019 predictive capabilities more than 2023 has.<\/p>\n

For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records each month by up to 0.2 \u00b0C \u2014 a huge margin at the planetary scale. A general warming trend is expected because of rising greenhouse-gas emissions, but this sudden heat spike greatly exceeds predictions made by statistical climate models that rely on past observations. Many reasons for this discrepancy have been proposed but, as yet, no combination of them has been able to reconcile our theories with what has happened.<\/p>\n

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Earth just had its hottest year on record \u2014 climate change is to blame<\/p>\n<\/article>\n

For a start, prevalent global climate conditions one year ago would have suggested that a spell of record-setting warmth was unlikely. Early last year, the tropical Pacific Ocean was coming out of a three-year period of La Ni\u00f1a, a climate phenomenon associated with the relative cooling of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. Drawing on precedents when similar conditions prevailed at the beginning of a year, several climate scientists, including me, put the odds of 2023 turning out to be a record warm year at just one in five.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Climate models can\u2019t explain 2023\u2019s huge heat anomaly \u2014 we could be in uncharted territory Taking into account all known factors, the planet warmed 0.2 \u00b0C more last year than climate scientists expected. More and better data are urgently needed. When I took over as the director of NASA\u2019s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[141,9104,9954,2956,34551],"class_list":["post-68049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-climate-change","tag-climate-modelling","tag-climate-models","tag-climate-science","tag-gavin-schmidt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=68049"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68050,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68049\/revisions\/68050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}