The sun is out again. Alleluia! Beginning last Sunday and throughout Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the Pineapple Express atmospheric river unloaded its burden across California. Don’t get me wrong: We need the rain to replenish our state’s depleted reservoirs after years of drought. Is it asking too much not to have the rain all at once? Consider downtown Los Angeles. Within just four days, the area was drenched with more than 8 inches (20 cm) of rain. That’s more than half of the area’s normal annual rainfall of 14.25 inches (36 cm).

We were well warned ahead of the onslaught. To ensure our city had the required resources to respond to the storm’s impacts, on Monday, February 5th, our Mayor Karen Bass signed a Declaration of Local Emergency throughout the City of Los Angeles. Flooding, fallen trees, and hundreds of mudslides were merciless to everything and everyone in their path. I give thanks that our neighborhood was spared from such devastating blows. At our apartment complex, the lawn and garden plots are fully saturated. Some plants thrive in such weather. Others, like some of my succulents, not so much.

Extreme climate change events have become more frequent and severe. How the gods must laugh at human ineptitude in connecting the dots between our behavior and our environment! We can no longer have it all. Yet, we persist in our self-destructive ways of being and doing. Drill, Baby, Drill!

On January 13th, NASA announced that 2023 was the hottest year on record, based on analysis of annual global average temperatures by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). Overall, Earth was about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit (or about 1.4 degrees Celsius) warmer in 2023 than in 1880 when modern record keeping began.

In the video below, Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s GISS, explains how they measure global temperatures and calculate how much temperatures have changed compared to temperatures from 1951-1980. Praise to our mathematicians!

“The exceptional warming that we’re experiencing is not something we’ve seen before in human history,” said Gavin Schmidt. “It’s driven primarily by our fossil fuel emissions, and we’re seeing the impacts in heat waves, intense rainfall, and coastal flooding.”

The chart below depicts atmospheric CO² from January 1959 to January 2024, based on carbon dioxide concentrations at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. The line of “350 parts per million” highlights the “safe” level of carbon dioxide for human societies to thrive.

Other factors affecting the 2023 record heat include:

1. The return of El Niño, increasing sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean
2. Long-term global ocean warming and hotter-than-normal sea surface temperatures
3. Decrease in aerosols that slow the rise in temperatures, and, to a lesser degree,
4. Eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai undersea volcano in January 2022.

Read the complete NASA Press Release on January 13, 2024.

In addition to ranking 2023 as the warmest year in its global temperature record, dating back to 1850, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) offers a more comprehensive look in their Annual 2023 Global Climate Report.

Other highlights of the NCEI/NOAA report include:

• Upper ocean heat content—the amount of heat stored in the top 2000 meters of the ocean—was record high in 2023.
• Average annual Arctic sea ice extent was among the 10 lowest since 1979, and Antarctic sea ice extent was the lowest on record.
• There were 78 named tropical storms across the globe in 2023, which was below average, and 20 in the North Atlantic, which was well above average.

Their predictions for this year offer little relief:

• A one-in-three chance that 2024 will be warmer than 2023 and
• A 99 percent chance that 2024 will rank among the five warmest years on record.

Read the Full Report at NCEI/NOAA.

In a press release on January 9, 2024, on Global Climate Highlights 2023, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service also confirmed 2023 as the warmest calendar year in their global temperature data records going back to 1850.

What I find disconcerting is one of their key messages (emphasis mine):

2023 marks the first time on record that every day within a year has exceeded 1°C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial level for that time of year. Close to 50% of days were more than 1.5°C warmer than the 1850-1900 level, and two days in November were, for the first time, more than 2°C warmer.

As in the case of exceeding the optimum CO² 350 ppm limit for human societies to thrive, we are now tampering with the 1.5°C limit agreed upon at the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris, France.

There’s no cause for alarm, says Russel Vose, chief of the Monitoring and Assessment Branch at NCEI/NOAA. During the NOAA/NASA 2023 Global Climate Media Briefing on January 12th, he noted: “In one year, above 1.5°C doesn’t mean we’ve crossed that threshold permanently, but the message is that things are starting to approach that threshold. Which is, I think, projected to happen on a sustained basis sometime in the 2030s or 2040s.”

All these recorded global temperature data caused dire real-life consequences for our safety, property, and livelihood. These weather/climate disasters also impact our local and state economies. Thanks to our record-keepers at NCEI/NOAA, we know that our hottest year on record resulted in over US$90 billion in damages here in the United States. Twenty-eight (28) of these confirmed weather/climate disaster events exceeded US$1 billion in losses.

As shown in the US 2023 Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters Map, these events included 1 drought event, 4 flooding events, 19 severe storm events, 2 tropical cyclone events, 1 wildfire event, and 1 winter storm event. Overall, these events resulted in the deaths of 492 people and had significant economic effects on the areas impacted. The 1980–2023 annual average is 8.5 events; the annual average for the most recent 5 years (2019–2023) is 20.4 events.

For me and my sons, the global climate crisis has made our lives more precarious and uncertain. I hold on to what is essential. I embrace each new day as a blessing to be lived with compassion and love.