2023 In Climate Change

This article documents events, research findings, scientific and technological advances, and human actions to measure, predict, mitigate, and adapt to the effects of global warming and climate change—during the year 2023.

Summaries

* 6 February: U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said "I have a special message for fossil fuel producers and their enablers scrambling to expand production and raking in monster profits: If you cannot set a credible course for net-zero, with 2025 and 2030 targets covering all your operations, you should not be in business."
*20 March – The final synthesis of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report is published. It summarises the state of knowledge relating to climate change with assessed levels of confidence. Conclusions in the summary for contemporary policy-makers include that the extent to which both current and future generations will be impacted depends on choices now and in the near-term, with "high confidence" that policies implemented by the end of 2020 are "projected to result in higher global GHG emissions in 2030 than emissions implied by NDCs" and would fail to meet global climate goals.
* 6 September: U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said "Our planet has just endured a season of simmering — the hottest summer on record. Climate breakdown has begun."
* 24 October: ''BioSciences "2023 state of the climate report" stated that "we must shift our perspective on the climate emergency from being just an isolated environmental issue to a systemic, existential threat".
* 27 December: ''Inside Climate News'' summarized the year: "The push and pull of progress and catastrophe made 2023 one of the most discordant—and consequential—years for the world’s climate. ... In 2023, clean energy progress and the horrors of a radically warming climate fought almost to a draw."

Measurements and statistics

* 3 January: the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that Antarctic sea ice extent stood at the lowest in the 45-year satellite record—more than 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles) below the previous record (2018), with four of the five lowest years for the last half of December having occurred since 2016.
* 26 January: Bloomberg NEF's "Energy Transition Investment Trends" report estimated that, for the first time, energy transition investment matched global fossil fuel investment—$1.1 trillion in 2022, including China with $546 billion, the US with $141 billion, and the EU if treated as a bloc, $180 billion.
* 3 April: An unexplained rise of emissions of five chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), successfully banned by the Montreal Protocol of 1989, is reported in ''Nature Geoscience''. Their climate impact in 2020 is roughly equivalent to that of the CO₂e from Denmark in 2018.
* Reported 10 May: '' Drax Electric Insights'' reported that in the first three months of 2023, Britain's wind turbines generated more electricity (32.4%) than gas-fired power stations (31.7%) for the first time.
* 18 May: a study published in ''Science'' reported that more than 50% of freshwater lakes and reservoirs lost volume from 1992 to 2020.


* 31 May: an international study in ''Nature'', using modelling and literature assessment, codifies, integrates into and quantifies "safe and just Earth system boundaries" (ESBs) with the context of Earth system stability and minimization of human harm. They expand upon earlier boundary frameworks by incorporating concepts such as intra- and intergenerational justice, propose that their framework may better enable a quantitative foundation for safeguarding the global commons, and report many of the ESBs are already exceeded.
* 15 June: the Copernicus Climate Change Service said that for 11 days, global surface air temperatures had risen to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above pre-industrial levels for the first time—the limit aspired to in the 2015 Paris Agreement—the rise occurring near the beginning of an El Niño warming phase.
* 24 July: the National Data Buoy Center recorded an unprecedented temperature of at a depth of in Florida Bay, Florida, US, raising concerns about catastrophic coral bleaching.
* 8 August: in coastal Iran, the heat index reached .
* 29 August: an International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) publication stated that ~86% (187 GW) of renewable capacity added in 2022 had lower costs than electricity generated from fossil fuels.
* 31 August: an article in ''Geophysical Research Letters'' reported a March 2022 "unprecedented heatwave" in the Antarctic reaching above average—the largest temperature anomaly ever recorded globally—attributed 2 °C of the increase to global warming, and projected possible heatwaves of an additional warmer by 2100.
* 29 September: a study published in ''Nature Communications