Currently in D.C. — November 1, 2023: Sunny and cold

The weather, currently.

And, just like that, October is gone and we welcome November. I hope we find a lot of reasons to enjoy this month. Speaking of which, Feliz día de los muertos! (Happy Day of the Dead.) Back home this was my favorite holiday.

One of the things that fascinates me about D.C. is the volatile weather. Any given week can turn into a weather adventure. After experiencing summer-like temperatures, suddenly the cold is back and it will stay like that throughout the first half of the month. Today we have a mostly sunny day with some clouds around 2 in the afternoon. The highest temperature will be 52°F and it will drop to the 40s and 30s as we get deeper into the night. Humidity will be low too. 

In honor of today’s holiday, I decided to write a “calaverita” (a short poem involving death.) “On a cold November evening, the Catrina went out for a stroll, mind D.C. 's weather someone told her, unless you want to catch a bad cold.”

— Myriam Vidal Valero

What you need to know, currently.

The data are in, and October 2023 was the hottest October in history.

With a year so unusually warm as this, it’s sometimes easy to assume that scientists didn’t see it coming. That’s not quite true. In fact, global climate models created 10 years ago still are doing a great job of capturing how extreme this year is.

And it’s not just this year. In general, global temperatures in recent years have been tracking right along the middle of where scientists thought they’d be by now assuming emissions kept rising. (They have.) In fact, temperatures are not too far off from where scientists back in the 1980s thought they’d be right now, assuming a scenario of only limited climate action came true. (It has.)

So, we saw this coming. And we should have done more to stop it. And we know that ramped up action in the coming years will still work.

In the 35 years since the 1988 congressional testimony of NASA climate scientist James Hansen, humanity has now used effectively all of its atmospheric carbon budget for keeping global warming at or below 1.5°C since preindustrial levels. But it doesn’t have to go much further than that if we do what we know we need to do.

— Eric Holthaus

What you can do, currently.

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