The European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) announced that the year 2023 was the planet’s hottest on record by a significant margin and likely the world’s warmest in the past 100,000 years.
Last year was about 1.48C warmer than the long-term average before humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels.
Last year was 0.17C (0.31F) hotter than 2016, the previous hottest year – smashing the record by a “remarkable” margin.
Since June, every month has been the world’s hottest on record compared with the corresponding month in previous years.
Last year, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere rose to the highest level recorded at 419 parts per million.