The world temperature numbers for September are in, and they don’t seem to be good. “This month was, in my professional opinion as a climate scientist—absolutely gobsmackingly bananas,” Zeke Hausfather posted Tuesday on X (previously generally known as Twitter).
Kristina Dahl, principal local weather scientist on the Union of Concerned Scientists, learn that publish yesterday. “I’ve been sitting at my desk trying to think of a better way to describe that, but I can’t,” Dahl says. “It’s just shocking.”
“Concerning, worrying, wild—whatever superlative you want to use,” says Kate Marvel, senior scientist at Project Drawdown, a nonprofit that fights local weather change. “That’s what it is.”
The graph under, created by Hausfather, a researcher on the local weather group Berkeley Earth, reveals temperature anomalies, which means how excessive every month was above a historic common baseline temperature. Each multicolored line represents a earlier yr, coloration coded by decade. (The Nineties, for instance, are the strains in yellow.) The strong black line is 2023, and it has been hovering above the others since May. It stops within the month of September, which beat the prior month-to-month report by greater than 0.5 levels Celsius.
This September was on common 1.8 levels C hotter than preindustrial ranges, properly above the Paris Agreement’s purpose of conserving temperatures from rising greater than 1.5 C. (Important caveats on that in a second.)
Courtesy of Zeke Hausfather
“We’ve already seen a summer of extreme temperatures, so my threshold for being surprised was a bit higher,” Hausfather tells WIRED. “But just how extreme September was, it’s kind of bananas; 0.5 C is just off the charts. We’ve never seen a month with that level of jump before.”
“It’s astounding to see the previous record broken by so much,” agrees Dahl. “And astounding to see that the global temperature this September is on par with what we normally see in July—the hottest month of the year, typically. So it really just illustrates how profoundly our climate is shifting.”
What’s unfolded all summer time has been a combination of local weather science elements, a few of that are properly understood and others which might be extra unsure. It’s a certainty that the extra greenhouse gases we pump into the ambiance, the extra warming we get. “We should expect not just record-breaking extremes, but record-shattering extremes,” says Marvel. “Things that break previous records by incredible margins.”