by Willy Blackmore
There’s a new way to describe just how hot last summer was, which has previously been called the hottest summer on record. The thing about climate records, however, is that they only go back so long: for global temperatures, there is only adequate data from 1880 onward (though the Central England Temperature Data Series has been consistently maintained since 1659). And since “the hottest summer since at least 1880 but maybe longer” just doesn’t have any kind of ring to it, a group of German and Czech researchers looked deeper in search of a better answer.
What they found after reconstructing pre-1880 temperatures by studying tree-ring growth is that the summer of 2023 was the hottest in at least 2,000 years.
Think about that, about the year 23 C.E.: “Geography,” a book documenting the entire known world as far as the Greeks and Romans were concerned, was published then. A map included in the book stretches from Europe to India, from Ireland to Ethiopia — that’s all that they knew existed. The year 23 is when Pliny the Elder was born. It would be 1469 years before Christopher Columbus set sail on the Atlantic, and nearly 1,600 years before the first ship of enslaved people would dock at Jamestown. It’s been that long since it’s been as hot on planet Earth.
There’s a NASA map of last summer’s heat that shows how much hotter or cooler a given area was over the baseline average from 1951 to 1980, and it’s a reminder that while the whole world is getting hotter, it’s getting that much hotter for certain groups of people — including Black Americans.
Black and brown neighborhoods are frequently hotter than white ones.
The splotch of darker red, denoting a larger increase in temperature, that covers most of Mexico also bleeds up along the Gulf Coast, home to one of the largest concentrations of Black people in the country.
And even within cities that have not yet seen their temperatures rise as much, Black and brown neighborhoods are frequently hotter than white ones.
As “The Simpson’s” meme goes, it’s not really the hottest summer ever — it’s the coldest summer of the rest of your life. And that’s the big takeaway from the study, which was published in the journal Nature: “When you look at the long sweep of history, you can see just how dramatic recent global warming is,” the University of Cambridge’s Ulf Büntgen, a co-author of the study, said in a release. “2023 was an exceptionally hot year, and this trend will continue unless we reduce greenhouse gas emissions dramatically.”