The year 2023 has been confirmed as the warmest on record, driven by human-caused climate change and boosted by the natural El Niño weather event. Last year was about 1.48C warmer than the long-term average before humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels, the EU's climate service says. Almost every day since July has seen a new global air temperature high for the time of year, BBC analysis shows.
"What struck me was not just that was record-breaking, but the amount by which it broke previous records," notes Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University. The margin of some of these records - which you can see on the chart below - is "really astonishing", Prof Dessler says, considering they are averages across the whole world.But 12 months ago, no major science body actually predicted 2023 being the hottest year on record, because of the complicated way in which the Earth's climate behaves.But the world then went on a remarkable, almost unbroken streak of daily records in the second half of 202