The climate future arrived in 2023. It left scars across the planet. - Video

AVAS, Greece — By the time the flames were barreling down the slope, heading for 40 miles of parched forest, the fire chief said he already knew: This was the big one. His part of Greece had gone two months without rain. A record heat wave had baked the area for weeks. Within hours, the fire had sprinted through acres of pines, hissing and spouting 120-foot flames, reaching the brink of a village where a single home — belonging to Kostas Dinas, a retired attorney — was perched on the hillside outskirts. Dinas, 66, had figured he’d live in that home until they “carried me out flat.”But then came the hottest year humanity had ever seen. It had been a year that had started with merely very hot temperatures and then intensified midway. What made the subsequent months stand out wasn’t so much any single record but rather the heat’s all-consuming relentlessness. It went day by day, continent by continent, until people all over the map, whether in the Amazon or the Pacific islands or rural Greece, had glimpsed a climate future for which they are not prepared.“It felt like the earth was about to explode,” Dinas said. Even if its extremes are ultimately eclipsed, as seems inevitable, 2023 will mark a point when humanity crossed into a new climate era — an age of “global boiling,” as United Nations Secretary General António Guterres called it. The year included the hottest single day on record (July 6) and the hottest ever month (July), not to mention the hottest June, the hottest August, the hottest September, the hottest October, the hottest November, and probably the hottest December. It included a day, Nov. 17, when global temperatures, for the first time ever, reached 2 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial levels. Discomfort, destruction, and death are the legacy of those records. In Phoenix, a heat wave went on for so long, with 31 consecutive days above 110 Fahrenheit, that one NASA atmospheric scientist called it “mind-boggling.” The surrounding county recorded a record number of heat deaths, nearly 600. In Brazil, drought sapped the normally lush Amazon, causing towns to ration drinking water, contributing to the deaths of endangered pink dolphins, and choking off the river-based system of travel and commerce. In the Antarctic, wintertime sea ice was at an all-time low. An unprecedented marine heat wave upended coral ecosystems. At one point the coastal Florida Keys waters reached 100 degrees, comparable to a hot tub. And in Greece, in the wake of extreme heat, fires broke out on many fronts — none bigger than the blaze that arrived on Aug. 21 in Avas, a village of 400 people with a taverna, a tidy cluster of stone homes, including one high above the others, at the end of a winding road overlooking the town. Dinas had bought that house from a friend in 2012, seeking a way to move from a nearby city back to his home village. He’d poured his savings into a renovation. He’d stocked the home with his books and vinyl records.


All data is taken from the source: http://washingtonpost.com
Article Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/12/31/2023-record-heat-temperatures/


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