‘Humbling, and a bit worrying’: Scientists fail to fully explain record global heat

Deadly heat in the Southwest. But last year’s sudden spike in global temperatures blew far beyond what statistical climate models had predicted, leading one noted climate scientist to warn that the world may be entering “uncharted territory.” “It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has,” wrote Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in a recent article in the journal Nature. Michael Mann, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, said the premise that 2023’s warmth cannot be explained — or that it is inconsistent with model simulations — is “simply wrong.” “The situation is extremely similar to what we saw during the 2014-2016 period as we transitioned from several years of La Niña conditions to a major El Niño event, and then back to La Niña,” Mann said in an email. Conversely, last year’s spike arrived in August, September, October and November — before the peak of El Niño — “and that has never happened before,” Schmidt said. “I think it’s unfortunate that so much has been made of the El Niño-spiked 2023 global temperatures, where in my view there is nothing surprising, or inconsistent with model predictions, there,” said Mann.