In Short : Seven scientists share their sentiments in the aftermath of the hottest year on record. Their perspectives likely range from concerns about climate change impacts to the urgency for collective action and innovative solutions to address the escalating global temperatures.
In Detail : What it’s like to study a world facing unprecedented changes.
2023 is the hottest year in at least 174 years and recent months have been the hottest in 125,000 years. All of that warming led to deadly heat waves, disease outbreaks, floods, droughts, and record low ice levels around Antarctica.
The extreme weather this year stems in part from natural variability, including a powerful El Niño warming pattern in the Pacific Ocean that reshaped weather around the world. But beneath these cycles, humanity’s ravenous appetite for coal, oil, and natural gas is driving up concentrations of heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere to levels the Earth hasn’t witnessed for 3 million years.
This year may be the first time that annual temperatures have risen 1.5 degrees Celsius, 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above the global average at the dawn of the industrial revolution. Under the 2015 Paris agreement, just about every country in the world agreed to keep the planet’s average temperature from rising more than 2°C, striving to stay below 1.5°C. A single year rising past this level doesn’t mean this target is toast, but if people keep heating up the planet, a year like 2023 will become one of the coolest we’ll experience in the rest of our lives.
Earlier this month, leaders from around the world wrapped the largest climate conference in history aimed at preventing this outcome. The COP28 meeting in the United Arab Emirates produced an agreement that explicitly called on countries to reduce fossil fuel use for the first time and provide more money to countries facing destruction worsened by warming. But the commitments made so far are still not enough to limit warming to 1.5°C, and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.
Half a world away, scientists who study this warming and its consequences gathered at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. Climate change is not an abstraction for these researchers, and many are observing it in real time, often in areas that have personal stakes for them. Looking back on the hottest year on record and what little humanity has done about it, some are reckoning with how their own work fits in. From the retreat of Arctic ice to rising demand for air conditioning, scientists with their fingers on the pulse of the planet are experiencing a mix of optimism, dread, and urgency as they endeavor to make their research practical in the real world.
I spoke with seven researchers studying Earth’s changes from different angles. Their comments below have been lightly edited.
Daniel Schindler at the University of Washington researches how climate change affects aquatic ecosystems, including Alaska’s sockeye, chinook, and chum salmon. He was one of several scientists presenting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic Report Card for 2023 at the conference. The Arctic has been warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, and this year, the region saw its warmest summer since 1900 (when record-keeping began), with knock-on effects like Canada’s worst wildfire season on record. As negotiators in the United Arab Emirates bickered over the future of the planet, Schindler noted that the effects of climate change are underway now, and it’s already reshaping ecosystems and human communities:
Rick Thoman, who studies Alaska’s climate and weather at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, echoed the call for more immediate steps to deal with global warming, noting that the Arctic has been at the leading edge of climate change long before it reached the extremes seen this year. The communities there may have important lessons for the rest of the world:
Sarah Cooley, an assistant professor at the University of Oregon, is studying how climate change is altering ice in places like coastal Alaska and has found that when you zoom in, the way it affects people can be quite complicated. How ice melts and the impacts it has on communities can vary drastically, even in nearby regions. With COP28 still falling short of global climate goals, Cooley is also looking into the way the success or failure of international negotiations will manifest on the ground:
Robert Green, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is leading a project to track mineral dust using instruments on the International Space Station. This is an important mechanism that can change air quality, the flow of nutrients across the planet, and the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth, which can cool the planet. Green is also keeping an eye on methane, a greenhouse gas with about 30 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide. At COP28, countries made new pledges to curb methane, and Green said scientists can help them meet their targets:
Stepp Mayes, a doctoral student at the University of Southern California, studies how people use electricity and the ensuing consequences for the climate and for health. Lately he’s been examining the growing demand for air conditioning as temperatures rise and the stresses that imparts on the power grid. As temperatures go up, people install more cooling systems, run them longer, and crank them up during the hottest times of day. That’s often when the power grid is struggling the most to provide electricity. The extreme heat this year coupled with record-high energy demand signals that this work is only going to become more important:
Aliyah Griffith, a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, studies coral reef infrastructure around places like Barbados, from satellites and from the water. Griffith is also the founder and CEO of Mahogany Mermaids, a nonprofit that works to encourage women of color to pursue careers in science, particularly in aquatic fields. The extreme temperatures this year, including heat waves in the ocean, have renewed her determination:
Gordon Walker, a researcher at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, studies paleoclimate, particularly how past shifts in the climate and weather influenced historical events. For instance, changing climate conditions in Africa and the Caribbean were a factor in the slave trade and may have played a part in uprisings. For Walker, the role of the climate in historical periods of unrest is adding urgency for the need to fill in data gaps as the climate breaches records, particularly in regions experiencing the most acute impacts of warming today.