Extreme weather is ‘smacking us in the face’ with worse to come, but a ‘tiny window’ of hope remains, say leading climate scientists
“While some of the records being set in 2023 are just crazy off-the-charts, everything is actually tracking within the range of projections of how Earth would respond to increasing greenhouse gas emissions – projections we’ve had now for the last 30-plus years,” said Prof Matthew England, of the University of New South Wales , Australia.
The current level of extreme weather impacts boded ill for the future as emissions continued to be pumped into the atmosphere, the scientists said. “Unfortunately, these new records will not last. Global warming will push records into the unknown sooner rather than later,” said Dr Raúl Cordero, until recently at the University of Santiago, Chile.
“The impacts are frighteningly more impactful than I – and many climate scientists I know – expected,” said Prof Krishna AchutaRao, of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Prof Francisco Eliseu Aquino, of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, said: “I have also been scared by these extreme events in the last weeks and months. They are more intense and going beyond what we expected for this decade.
Prof J Marshall Shepherd, of the University of Georgia, US, put it succinctly: “Climate scientists have warned of this for decades and we are now living these predictions.” Dr Christophe Cassou, a CNRS researcher at Université Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier, in France, said: “Changes in hazards have not been underestimated at global scale, though some of the heat extremes are in the upper-range of the anticipated outcomes. But the impacts have been underestimated because we are much more vulnerable than we thought – our vulnerability is smacking us in the face.”
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