Could global warming impede weather and climate forecasting? Premium

Record warming in 2023-2024 reveals global climate extremes, prompting questions about the future of weather and climate predictions.

With the record warming of 2023-2024, we are getting a clearer picture of what global warming does. The medley of extremes strewn across the planet have covered the gamut from deadly heatwaves to devastating cyclones and floods, from droughts to wildfires.

According to some estimates, the world has already crossed the 1.5º  C warming threshold. (That is, the earth’s average surface temperature has increased by more than 1.5º C over the pre-industrial average.) The caveat is that global temperatures are an estimate produced from a combination of data and climate models. Because the 1.5º C limit is part of a demand by the Alliance of Small Island and Developing States, scientists have built models to predict what environmental disturbances crossing this threshold could invite.

However, and more importantly, it is not yet clear how long the warming has to remain above the threshold for the projected impacts to materialise.

The spectacular show that nature has put up during 2023-2024 is also a stark reminder that we are far from able to predict the weather and the climate with the requisite skills and spatial-temporal scales to manage disasters effectively. The loss of lives, livelihoods, property, and infrastructure continues to traumatise humanity, especially the poor, who remain very vulnerable to extreme events.

Meteorologists predicted the 2023 El Niño as early as in the spring of that year, which is remarkable. But the level of warming during 2023-2024 has caught them, and the public, by surprise because it was much higher than expected from the addition of the so-called mini-global warming by the El Niño to the ongoing background warming. We speculate that water vapour thrown up by the underwater volcano Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai during 2022 and carbon dioxide emitted by the wildfires exacerbated the warming.

The 2023 monsoon was deficit but it did not qualify as an El Niño drought, the reasons for which researchers are yet to diagnose. Predictions from nearly all major weather centres earlier promised a strong La Niña in late 2024. Now this seems less likely. Perhaps nature has another googly in waiting.

Similarly, weather forecasts have called for the most intense hurricane season in decades but which has yet to step beyond normal.