As per The Guardian, this means that 2023 is again on track to be the hottest year to-date. Samantha Burgess, the deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, warned that "we can say with near certainty that 2023 will be the warmest year on record, and is currently 1.43C above the pre-industrial average. The sense of urgency for ambitious climate action going into Cop28 has never been higher."

Since the Industrial Revolution, humanity caused temperatures to surge 1.2 degrees Celsius by releasing vast amounts of CO2 emissions, as well as destroying ecosystems and deforesting large areas.

Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, said: "the fact that we’re seeing this record hot year means record human suffering. Within this year, extreme heatwaves and droughts made much worse by these extreme temperatures have caused thousands of deaths, people losing their livelihoods, being displaced, etc. These are the records that matter."

Eight years ago, world leaders vowed to reduce the planet's temperatures by 1.5 degrees Celsius before the end of the century, however, current policies are set to cause an increase of 2.4 degrees.

Akshay Deoras, a meteorology research scientist at the University of Reading, stated that "it is frightening to see that the global temperature since June 2023 is much warmer than that during the second half of 2015, when El Niño was much stronger. Our planet continues to pass through unfortunate milestones in its meteorological history, and it won’t be surprising to see new records in subsequent months."

So far, global average temperatures between January and October 2023 are the highest on record. These averages are higher than the 10-month span of 2016, the current hottest year ever.