Study says 2023's crazy Atlantic ocean heat, low Antarctic sea ice give glimpse of much hotter world

Off the charts “crazy” heat in the North Atlantic ocean and record-smashing Antarctic sea ice lows last year are far more severe than what Earth’s supposed to get with current warming levels. They are more like what happens at twice this amount of warming, a new study said.

The study’s main author worries that it’s a “harbinger of what’s coming in the next decades” and it’s got him not just concerned, but wondering why those two climate indicators were so beyond what was expected.

A study in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society charted the North Atlantic sea temperature and the Antarctic sea ice halfway across the globe against long-accepted computer simulations. Sea ice levels that low and North Atlantic temperatures that much above normal are supposed to occur regularly in a world that has warmed 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times.

But that’s not where Earth is right now.

Last year, a record hot year by far, the world was 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.66 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times, according to the European climate agency Copernicus. And over the long-term of decades, which is what scientists use, the world is at about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than normal.

“The climate of 2023 with all the disasters, you know, with all the wildfires in Canada and all the flooding events in Europe and everything, you can interpret this as, this what we will have every year. Year after year after year in the 3-degree world,” said study author Till Kuhlbrodt, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Sciences and the University of Reading in England. “You don’t want to go...