According to an analysis, the months since last November have been the hottest 12-month period in 125,000 years. The global average temperature was around 1.32 degrees Celsius above the value before the Industrial Revolution. This emerges from an analysis by the non-profit news organization Climate Central in Princeton (New Jersey, USA).
The analysis included temperature records from 175 countries, 154 states or provinces and 920 major cities from November 2022 to October 2023. The team of experts led by Andrew Pershing from Climate Central published the analysis on its own information portal.
The heat doesn’t just affect poorer countries. “While climate impacts are greatest in developing countries near the equator, climate-related periods of extreme heat in the United States, India, Japan and Europe underscore that no one is safe from climate change,” Pershing points out.
The city of Houston in Texas (USA) was a particular heat spot during the period examined: from July 31, 2023, there was extreme heat there for 22 days, longer than in any other city in the world. The cities of New Orleans (Louisiana, USA), Jakarta and Tangerang (both Indonesia) followed in the ranking with 17 days of extreme heat each. Munich was the only German city with over a million inhabitants to record a wave of extreme heat for at least five days in a row. A total of eleven days of extreme heat were measured there during the study period.
Just on Wednesday, the EU climate change service Copernicus reported based on other measurements that the temperature in the first ten months of 2023 was 1.43 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average. Accordingly, October 2023 was not only the warmest since records began, but according to data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it was even the warmest in 125,000 years. The current year will almost certainly be the warmest recorded so far.
