Climate change: 2023 was the hottest ever recorded globally

2023 was the hottest year globally since measurements began. Quite a few countries, including Bulgaria, set records. So far, 2019 has been the hottest year in this country. Meteorologists report a much longer agricultural drought in 2023.

Zhelyazko Atanasov has been a farmer for nearly 30 years. He cultivates 60 decares of land, mostly vegetables in the land of the village of Katunitsa, Assenovgrad region. During the big floods in 2018, when Maritsa river overflowing broke dikes and flooded arable land, he lost 12 decares with cabbage:

"We suffered losses of crop and income."

Zhelyazko and his colleagues are feeling the effects of global warming:

"20-30 years ago the weather was very different, winters were cold with snow, there were rains in autumn. Now the autumn sowing is very late because there are no autumn rains. The land can't be worked in dry weather, farmers wait for rain and it becomes November, December and the crops don't have time to grow."

Experts report that every decade since 1980 has been warmer than the one before.

That doesn't mean that every subsequent year is warmer than the previous year. We have a fluctuating temperature regime, but it goes upwards," said Assoc. Prof. Dr. Lilia Bocheva, director of the Meteorology Department at NIMH.

2023 stands out as the hottest ever recorded both globally and in Bulgaria.

"It is hard to say whether 2024 will be warmer than 2023, but there will undoubtedly be some months that will be record warm. The trends for 2024 are a continuation of the El Niño phenomenon, but this phenomenon is so with waning functions, it is weakening," explained Simeon Matev, PhD in Climatology at Sofia university.

Heat waves will continue in the new year and beyond, although we don't yet know exactly when and where they will happen.

"Bulgaria ranks among the countries that are so relatively hard hit by these phenomena. It is all too likely that in the summer we will have days with intense rainfall again, they will cause damage and if the mayors of the respective places have not learned the lessons from previous ones, they will again be top news in the media," said Simeon Matev.

According to the scenarios, more significant climate changes are expected towards the middle or end of the century.

"In the most unfavourable scenario, the temperature increase in individual seasons is above 5-6 degrees. We would have preferred not to go to the worst-case scenario, when the largest temperature increases are expected, because it also expects a reduction in precipitation, which means a reduction of up to 30% in some areas, which is already significant. The optimistic scenario is a limitation of the global temperature increase to 1/1.5 degrees by 2050," explained Assoc. Prof. Dr. Lilia Bocheva, Director of the Department of Meteorology at NIMH.

Values that experts say the planet is on track to exceed.

Images by BTA/archive