2023 confirmed as hottest year on record
Temperatures were so high in 2023 that a new colour could be needed to show it on the climate stripes image.
The series of vertical coloured bars offers a visual representation of how our planet is progressively heating up.
It was created by climate scientist Professor Ed Hawkins at the University of Reading, UK, in 2018
Running from blue to a deep red, the striking image hammers home the extreme warming driven by human-caused emissions in recent years.
With global temperatures soaring to the highest level ever recorded last year, a line of the darkest red has been added to the scale.
This week, the UK’s Met Office confirmed 2023 as the hottest year on record for Wales and Northern Ireland and the second warmest on record for the UK overall, just behind 2022.
Europe's Climate Change Service Copernicus indicated in December that 2023 would be the hottest recorded year in human history. Some official records, when released, are expected to show that 2023 was more than 1.5C above pre-industrial records.
“2023 was off the end of the scale,” says Professor Hawkins.
“This was always going to happen at some point, given the continued increase in global greenhouse gases… But the margin of record breaking in 2023 has still been a surprise,” he adds.
But this is a time for action, not despair.
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