Climate change and energy transition: the 2023 scorecard

Last year was the hottest on record by a wide margin. The planet is now 1.48 degrees Celsius warmer than it was before the fossil-fuel revolution.

Global heating is accelerating. This year is likely to set another record because the latter half of 2023 featured an El Niño climate pattern that continues to influence global weather. The last colder-than-average year, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was 1976.

The United States experienced a record number of billion-dollar weather disasters in 2023. Canada’s wildfires in June resulted in an unprecedented flurry of air-quality alerts in the Northeast and Midwest of the US, with New York temporarily suffering the worst air quality of any city in the world. Wildfires also devastated Maui.

Elsewhere in the world, Libya, Guam, Malawi and Peru experienced horrific floods. According to the United Nations, drought now affects a quarter of humanity. Developing countries were stuck with proportionally higher recovery costs on a per capita basis.

The solution to climate change is to reduce and reverse the decades-long trend of annually increasing greenhouse-gas concentration in the planetary atmosphere. So let’s see what the numbers tell us on that score.

Carbon emissions

The carbon-dioxide (CO2) level in Earth’s atmosphere is now more than 420 parts per million, up from 315ppm in 1958 when the first direct measurements commenced. The atmospheric CO2 concentration has been increasing at more than 2ppm per year for the past several years.

This added CO2 in the atmosphere comes from human activities that release carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) into the air. US carbon emissions were down 3% in 2023 thanks mainly to an ongoing national