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Simulations suggest that an extraordinary jump in temperatures seen in 2023 and 2024 could simply be natural variability, rather than a new phase of climate change as some researchers have suggested
Belgium was one of many counties that saw record temperatures in 2024
FREDERIC SIERAKOWSKI/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
The past couple of years have set worryingly high temperature records, but was the extraordinary global heat of 2023 and 2024 just a freak event down to natural variability, rather than a sign of something more worrying? Some climate scientists think so.
“From a model perspective, yes, it’s variability that we expect,” Karsten Haustein at Leipzig University in Germany told a meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna last week.
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