2023 summer warmth unparalleled over the past 2,000 years

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By Jan Esper, Max Torbenson & Ulf Büntgen, Nature. 

Abstract: Including an exceptionally warm Northern Hemisphere (NH) summer, 2023 has been reported as the hottest year on record. Contextualizing recent anthropogenic warming against past natural variability is nontrivial, however, because the sparse 19th century meteorological records tend to be too warm. Here, we combine observed and reconstructed June-August (JJA) surface air temperatures to show that 2023 was the warmest NH extra-tropical summer over the past 2000 years exceeding the 95% confidence range of natural climate variability by more than half a degree Celsius. ...Although 2023 is consistent with a greenhouse gases-induced warming trend that is amplified by an unfolding El Niño event, this extreme emphasizes the urgency to implement international agreements for carbon emission reduction. 

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