According to the research, published in the journal Nature, the summer of 2023 was the hottest since the heyday of the Roman Empire.
In the summer of 2023 was the warmest in northern hemisphere in the last 2,000 years. That’s what researchers from the University of Cambridge and Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany found by studying tree rings.
According to the research, published in the journal Nature, even taking into account natural climate changes over hundreds of years, the summer of 2023 (June, July and August) was the hottest since the heyday of the Roman Empire. , exceeding the extreme temperatures of natural climate variability by half a degree Celsius.
The 2023 has been reported as the warmest year that has been recorded, however, instrumental temperature records go back at best to 1850 and that in some areas.
The researchers point out that tree rings contain annually perfectly dated information about past summer temperatures. They found that the coldest summer of the past 2,000 years was in 536 AD, when temperatures were affected by a volcanic eruption, and was 3.93 degrees Celsius cooler than the summer of 2023.
In addition, they compared early data on instrumented temperatures from 1850-1900 with a tree-ring dataset and found that the 19th-century baseline temperature used to frame global warming is several tenths of a degree cooler than previously thought. By redefining it, the researchers estimated that the summer of 2023 conditions in the Northern Hemisphere were 2.07 degrees Celsius warmer than the average summer temperatures of the period 1850-1900.
Most of the warmer periods covered by tree-ring data can be attributed to the El Niño phenomenon, which affects the weather worldwide by weakening the winds in the Pacific Ocean and often leads to warmer summers in the Northern Hemisphere. In recent years, global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions is causing El Niño phenomena to intensify, resulting in warmer summers. The researchers point out that the current El Niño phenomenon is expected to continue until the early summer of 2024, making it likely that this summer will break temperature records again.
The research team notes that while their results are strong for the Northern Hemisphere, it is difficult to draw global averages, as data for the Southern Hemisphere is sparse. Also, the Southern Hemisphere reacts differently to climate change as it is covered by much more ocean than the Northern Hemisphere.
The research was supported in part by the European Research Council.
Source: Skai
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