From R. Max Holmes, President & CEO

Any way you slice it, 2023 was a remarkable year for Earth's climate.

Air and ocean temperatures shattered previous records, with warming in some months exceeding previous records by almost unimaginable margins. Heat waves, wildfires, floods, drought, and other climate extremes were depressingly commonplace, and lives and livelihoods were impacted across the globe. Every week seemed to bring a new disaster, a new headline, a new normal.

As 2023 unfolded and the magnitude of its warming became clearer, I began to wonder if something had fundamentally changed to account for the remarkable extremes. Yes, we had entered an El Niño phase, which tends to lead to warmer global temperatures, and cleaner shipping fuels required by recent international regulations could ironically also release additional warming. But the magnitude of the warming and its dramatic impacts led me, and many of my colleagues, to suspect that something else might be going on. Was it possible that the permafrost carbon feedback, which Woodwell scientists have studied for over a decade, had finally reached a tipping point? Or might Amazon forest dieback be unfolding, contributing additional carbon to the atmosphere? Somehow I just couldn’t accept that the remarkable warming we were seeing was “expected.”

Yet as 2024 progresses, more and more scientists are making the case that the seemingly anomalous warming of 2023 was exactly what we should have expected, and in fact was consistent with what climate models have been predicting for many years (page 13). I find myself being largely convinced by these arguments, which has created a dizzying array of competing emotions.

On the one hand, we could take comfort in the fact that we may have had the science right all along, that there wasn’t any unaccounted-for forcing that was pushing the climate to new extremes. But more fundamentally, it is cold comfort to have 2023’s extreme climate be the expected and unsurprising result of our failure to take aggressive action to slow climate change over the past years and decades. If we knew this was coming, how could we possibly have let it happen?

And yet here we are. Over the coming months, scientists will tease apart all the drivers of 2023’s remarkable warming, but what is abundantly clear is that human actions are the dominant drivers and only human actions will be able to reverse course in the future.

That, fundamentally, is the work of Woodwell Climate Research Center—putting the brakes on climate change by conducting science for solutions at the nexus of climate, people, and nature. This work has never been more urgent, more essential for achieving a sustainable future.

Each month, we see evidence of the impact our work is having (page 4). Each year, we are able to advance innovative ideas (page 2) and support the careers of aspiring new climate champions (page 5). And, once in a while, we get to celebrate a milestone for a project with a legacy and bright future of work that embodies “science for solutions.” This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Tanguro Field Station (page 16)—a unique, natural laboratory at the edge of the Amazon agricultural frontier that is at the heart of much of our work on balancing food and forests.

Thank you for being part of the Woodwell team. Thank you for making our essential work possible. Onward.