Something is not right - we are in unknown territory

Jonathan Jeppsson

Digging manager and climate columnist

This is a commenting text. Analysis and positions are the writer's.

Updated 13.33 | Published at 1:30 p.m

On June 12, the record was broken for the warmest measured June day ever. This broke the record from June 23, 2023.

Heat records are constantly being broken - both in the sea and on land.

The worrying thing is that scientists don't really know why.

Only in August will we know if we are in completely unknown terrain.

Quick version

• Heat records are regularly broken both in the sea and on land, which creates concern in the scientific community as the reason for this is unclear.
• The average temperature has increased by 1.63 degrees above pre-industrial levels in the past year.
• There is a high risk of temperature increases of more than 1.5 degrees in a calendar year over the next five years.

"If you cannot speak, you must remain silent," the philosopher Ludvig Wittgenstein once wrote.

And it's a sentence that has bearing on the modest attention that global warming is getting right now.

Just a few days ago, the record for the hottest recorded June day ever was broken – the previous record was set on June 23 last year.

In the last 12 months, we note an average temperature of 1,63 degrees above pre-industrial levels – the 1.5 degree limit has virtually already been blown.

Heat records have been broken month after month in the past year.

The oceans are probably warmer than they have been in 100,000 years.

Seven meters higher

We have reached the same temperature levels that prevailed during the Eem, the warm period that preceded the last Ice Age. The global sea levels were then about seven meters higher than today.

But what's worse - something is not right. Of course it was known that the temperature would be sent up by the ongoing, soon to be ended, weather phenomenon El Niño. But scientists still don't really understand how the heat pulse could be so powerful - El Niño was considerably more moderate than several previous ones. It is a couple of decimal places of heating that lacks explanation.

In 2015, the Hunga Tonga volcano had a huge eruption, which the researchers believe, among other things, caused the amount of water in the Earth's stratosphere to increase by five percent. Photo: AP

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) estimates that there is an 80 percent chance that temperatures will rise above 1.5 degrees in a calendar year over the next five years.

Just ten years ago, it was considered completely improbable. When I wrote my climate book ”Eight steps toward the abyss” five years ago, it was expected that this could happen around 2040.

So things are going much faster than we previously thought. But why?

No one has a really good answer.

Reduction of aerosols

Levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have of course continued to increase since 2022, but this can only account for an additional warming of about 0.02 degrees. It is speculated the volcanic eruption at Hunga Tonga may have contributed, but it had both warming and cooling effects.

There are theories that it is the reduction of aerosols, i.e. sulfur particles in the atmosphere, that may have accelerated the warming. In 2020, new, stricter requirements were introduced for ship fuel and sulfur particles in the atmosphere have a cooling effect because they reflect sunlight - but research is divided on how much can be explained by this.

It is something that the researchers are unable to grasp.
Gavin Schmidt, climate scientist and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, believes that an unprecedented gap in knowledge has been exposed. If the deviations in temperature for sea and land do not stabilize by August, the world is in unknown terrain.

It may also mean that the conclusions we previously drew are less reliable than we thought: The increasingly warm planet may have already changed the climate system much earlier than we thought it would.

"Need an answer"

"We need answers to why 2023 turned out to be the warmest year in possibly the last 100,000 years. And we need them fast," writes Gavin Schmidt.

When Wittgenstein established his thesis, he tried to draw a linguistic line between the meaningful and the nonsensical; the philosophical riddles would not be solved but, on the contrary, dissolved.

If the curves over the temperatures in the seas and on land do not return to more normal, however, we are faced with riddles that we can neither solve nor dissolve.

And then we probably have to start talking about it anyway.