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Since spring of 2023, the world has been warmer than climate models anticipated

Since early 2023, the world has seen a steep rise in temperatures that scientists are struggling to explain. Our contributor Elizabeth Kolbert talked with Gavin Schmidt, NASA’s top climate scientist, about possible causes of the warming and why experts cannot account for the heat.

In a warming world, the seas would be expected to grow hotter, but the rise, which came at a time when the Pacific Ocean was in the neutral phase of the weather pattern known as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, was unusually steep. Kolbert:[In March you wrote in Nature] that “a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated.” What did you mean by that? If the connections between the rest of the world and what’s happening in the tropical Pacific are changing, then all of those previous practices or recommendations based on the past relationships, maybe they’re no longer any good.

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