Newfound Lake in Bristol, New Hampshire, on Earth Day (April 22) 2024. Photo by Todd B. Bates/NH EnviroGuy blogger

Climate Change and Extreme Weather Update: The Northeast, U.S. and World

10 min readMay 2, 2024

Wow, what a year (2023) for climate change, unusual warmth and extreme heat, and severe weather in the Northeast, United States and globally.

The first third of this year has also featured some extremes.

Here are more than a few 2023 and 2024 highlights, plus some of the latest global data.

— Globally, last month was the warmest April on record, according to an analysis posted today by Brian Brettschneider, a PhD climatologist based in Alaska. It’s the 11th monthly record in a row.

Source: Brian Brettschneider, PhD climatologist based in Alaska

— The Northeast had its second warmest year (2023) since record-keeping began in 1895, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).

Snowfall and (Very!) Wet Weather Update for the Eastern U.S.

— Last year was the warmest on record at many major climate sites in the Northeast, including Concord in New Hampshire, Burlington in Vermont and Worcester in Massachusetts, the Northeast Regional Climate Center says.

— Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island had their warmest night-time temperatures on record last year. Above-average nighttime temperatures were observed across nearly all of the lower 48 states, the NCEI says.

Snowfall Maps Show Major Shortfalls in Northeast and Great Lakes States in Recent Winters

— Precipitation was above average across much of the Northeast last year. Maine had its fifth wettest year on record, while Vermont and Connecticut had their sixth wettest year, the NCEI says. It was the third wettest year in Worcester and fourth wettest in Hartford, Connecticut, the Northeast Regional Climate Center says.

Photos of Fall Colors in Norway, New England, California and Montana

— About 65 million people in the lower 48 states were affected by record heat last year, the NCEI says.

— Last year, the U.S. shattered the record for billion-dollar weather and climate disasters: 28 events compared with the previous record (22) set in 2020, based on statistics collected by the NCEI. In the lower 48 states, it was the fifth warmest year on record and the third driest.

— Globally, 2023 was the warmest year since global records began in 1850: 1.18 degrees Celsius (2.12 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 20th-century average, according to the NCEI. The 10 warmest years on record have all been in the last decade (2014–23).

— The average sea surface temperature last year was the highest on record, according to Zach Labe, a climate scientist and post-doc at Princeton University and NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.

— Global warming of 1.1 degrees Celsius (1.98 degrees Fahrenheit) has led to “more frequent & more intense extreme weather events that have caused dangerous impacts on nature & people worldwide,” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change posted. “Every increment of warming results in rapidly escalating hazards.”

— Levels of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas that is driving recent climate change, rose by nearly 100 parts per million (from 328 to 426) in the atmosphere from the first Earth Day in 1970 till Earth Day 2024, Labe posted.

— With greenhouse gas levels continuing to increase, last year included record sea-level rise as well as sea surface temperatures, record low Antarctic sea ice, along with extreme weather that caused death and devastation, according to the Provisional State of the Global Climate in 2023 report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

— 2011 to 2020 was warmest decade on record, according to The Global Climate 2011–2020: A decade of acceleration report by the WMO. Key observations included unprecedented glacier and ice sheet loss, accelerating sea-level rise, ocean heat and acidification damage to marine ecosystems, extreme weather that undermined sustainable development and an ozone layer that is on track to recover.

— “Harmful tipping points in the natural world pose some of the gravest threats faced by humanity. Their triggering will severely damage our planet’s life-support systems and threaten the stability of our societies,” according to the Global Tipping Points Summary Report 2023 led by experts at the University of Exeter in the UK. “For example, the collapse of the Atlantic Ocean’s great overturning circulation combined with global warming could cause half of the global area for growing wheat and maize to be lost. Five major tipping points are already at risk of being crossed due to warming right now and three more are threatened in the 2030s as the world exceeds 1.5°C (Celsius) global warming.” They are: the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, warm-water coral reefs, North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre circulation and permafrost regions.

Winter in New England: Extreme Weather and Climate Update, With Snowfall Maps

If you want to learn more about climate change, extreme weather and their impacts, check out these enlightening books, which I read in recent months: Our Fragile Moment, The Heat Will Kill You First and The End of Eden. I also began reading Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons, and Nuclear War: A Scenario is in my ever-growing pile. Nuclear war could have an horrific impact on people, nature and our planet … surpassed, perhaps, only by a large asteroid striking Earth.

Meanwhile, here’s a blast from the not so distant past: an EnviroGuy post that I wrote in 2015 (Earth Day: Ocean dumping, other memories ), my 30th and last year as an environmental writer at the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey: https://www.app.com/story/enviroguy/2015/04/22/earth-day-enviroguys-top-6-memories/26177231/

More images, including some of my recent photos in New Hampshire: