Raphael ThysPhoto by Felix Mittermeier on Unsplash
NASA’s Dire Warning For 2024
We need to brace ourselves.
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Published in
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5 min read
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Sep 19
2023 has been a wild year. The COVID-19 pandemic seems to have fizzled out (though its damage is still very much here), NFTs are now near worthless, Russia is still trying to relive its Soviet days, AI is now the latest fad, and the world has baked under extreme heat. NASA has said that July 2023 was the hottest July on record and that there is a 50/50 chance that 2023 will be the hottest year on record, all thanks to climate change. This heat has been literally deadly, sparking continent-wide heatwaves with peak temperatures unsurvivable by humans, unprecedented wildfires, biblical floods and powerful storms. To make matters worse, NASA is predicting that next year will be even hotter. But why? And how can we prepare ourselves for yet another year of lethal year of sky-high temperatures?
I have covered this before, but let’s recap why has 2023 been such an insanely hot year. It has all to do with climate change, El Niño and clean fuel laws…
Let’s start with El Niño. This rather complex ocean climate system in the Pacific effectively turns the ocean into a mega thermal battery. The currents in the Pacific naturally bury heat in its depths, causing surface temperatures to drop. This state is known as La Niña, and after a while, enough heat energy is built up to reverse this process, causing the trapped heat to escape. This causes the surface temperatures of the Pacific to dramatically jump up, in a state which is known as El Niño. This heat makes its way into the atmosphere, and as the Pacific is so massive, this extra heat can have a gigantic effect on the entire planet’s weather and climate.
We entered a very strong El Niño this year, which has helped peak temperatures across the entire globe. This might make it seem like this record heat has come from a natural process rather than man-made climate change, but that isn’t entirely true. Man-made climate change causes more frequent and more powerful (i.e. hotter) El Niño’s, as there is more heat available in the environment to charge this giant thermal battery. So, we share some of the blame for this strong El Niño.
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