DENVER — If you live in Colorado, where the first three months of the year were the coldest since 1988, you might have thought that global warming was on a break, or maybe that it had even been repaired. But the fact is, our state is just a small piece to a very large climate puzzle, and the atmosphere is continuing to warm.
While Colorado and most of the western United States were colder than average in the first three months of 2023, the eastern half of the country was warmer than average.
Nationally, it was the 20th warmest start to a year since 1895. And that’s even with the chilly Colorado temperatures added into the mix.
But even our country is too small to really gauge the way that global temperature is increasing.
NOAA averaged out all the official temperature measurements across the entire planet and found that the first three months of 2023 were the fourth-warmest in recorded history -- which is 174 years of data.
And there is an indication that the heat in 2023 will continue because there is a possible El Niño weather pattern developing. That tends to increase the global temperature even higher.
The warmest year in each of the last four decades have all been years controlled by an El Niño weather pattern -- including the warmest year in history, in 2016.
And the coldest years in those decades were La Niñas, except for the 1990s. In that decade, the El Niño year of 1992 was the coldest, but that is likely due to the climate cooling caused by the massive Mt. Pinatubo volcanic eruption.
There has not been an El Niño yet in the 2020s because the La Niña pattern has been dominant since 2020. But NOAA climatologists say there’s 62% chance of one developing before the end of July.
The global temperature data for April is still being processed and is expected to be released within the next week.
Here in Denver, April's temperature was exactly average.
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