Reacción a "Reactions: global temperature sets new heat record for the last 12 months"

Climate Central is a non-profit organisation based in Princeton (New Jersey, USA) that focuses primarily on the communication and dissemination of information related to climate change, providing tools and results for dissemination in the media. Its multidisciplinary team includes both scientists and communicators who strive to extract the most relevant information on climate change and its effects in order to communicate them effectively and reach a wide audience. In the case of this study, it concludes that the period from November 2022 to October 2023 is the warmest 12-month period since records have been kept, which in turn is consistent, as has been widely reported, with the monthly global temperature records that have been reached in recent months coinciding with a transition to the positive phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation.  

The most interesting aspect of the study is the use of the recently published Climate Change Index (CSI) which measures the extent to which climate change has influenced daily average temperatures in a particular region. The CSI is calculated on a day-by-day basis and allows real-time determination of how climate change has changed the probability of a daily temperature anywhere in the world. From this data, the regions, countries and cities that have experienced the highest values of the index in this 12-month period are determined. It is worth mentioning that Spain is the country in Europe with the highest CSI value and therefore the one that has been most influenced by climate change on its average temperatures.  

The results of this work, together with the tool that calculates the CSI index in real time on a daily basis and which is hosted on the Climate Central website, provide an immediate response to the role of anthropogenic climate change in the appearance of extreme temperatures anywhere in the world. However, it is primarily a tool and results designed to present attribution results and their immediate communication, rather than looking at special episodes on a case-by-case basis by performing case-specific simulations.