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

Simulations suggest that an extraordinary jump in temperatures seen in 2023 and 2024 could simply be natural variability, rather than a new phase of climate change as some researchers have suggested

By Michael Le Page

8 May 2025

Belgium was one of many counties that saw record temperatures in 2024

FREDERIC SIERAKOWSKI/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

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.

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