You just lived through history's hottest-ever October

From Eric Holthaus

The data are in, and October 2023 was the hottest October in history.

With a year so unusually warm as this, it’s sometimes easy to assume that scientists didn’t see it coming. That’s not quite true. In fact, global climate models created 10 years ago still are doing a great job of capturing how extreme this year is.

And it’s not just this year. In general, global temperatures in recent years have been tracking right along the middle of where scientists thought they’d be by now assuming emissions kept rising. (They have.) In fact, temperatures are not too far off from where scientists back in the 1980s thought they’d be right now, assuming a scenario of only limited climate action came true. (It has.)

So, we saw this coming. And we should have done more to stop it. And we know that ramped up action in the coming years will still work.

In the 35 years since the 1988 congressional testimony of NASA climate scientist James Hansen, humanity has now used effectively all of its atmospheric carbon budget for keeping global warming at or below 1.5°C since preindustrial levels. But it doesn’t have to go much further than that if we do what we know we need to do.

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From a BBC article: