Record heat in 2023 and 2024 may just have been natural variability

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.