- Written by Mark Pointing
- Climate and Environment Researcher, BBC News
image source, Getty Images
Last month was the world’s warmest February in modern times, marking the ninth consecutive monthly record, according to the EU Climate Change Agency.
The maximum temperature for this time of year has been updated every month since June 2023.
Global sea levels are at their hottest ever recorded, while Antarctic sea ice is once again at an extremely low point.
Temperatures are still rising due to El Niño in the Pacific, but the main driver of warming is anthropogenic climate change.
“It is clear that heat-trapping greenhouse gases are the main culprit,” emphasizes Professor Celeste Sauro, Director-General of the World Meteorological Organization.
Carbon dioxide levels are at their highest levels in at least two million years, and have increased by near-record levels again over the past year, according to the United Nations meteorological agency.
According to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Agency, these greenhouse gases meant temperatures in February 2024 were about 1.77 degrees warmer than in “pre-industrial” times (before humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels). That’s what it means.
This beats the previous record from 2016 by about 0.12 degrees.
These temperatures caused particularly severe heat in western Australia, Southeast Asia, southern Africa and South America.
In Paris in 2015, around 200 countries agreed to limit temperature rise to below 1.5 degrees Celsius to avoid the worst climate impacts.
Although the Paris Agreement threshold has not yet been broken, as it is generally accepted to mean a 20-year average, the relentless series of records shows how close the world is to reaching that benchmark. ing.
Ocean and sea ice under stress
Recent records are not just about temperature. Myriad climate indicators far exceed levels seen in modern times.
The most notable is sea surface temperature. As the graph below shows, the difference in records over recent months is particularly striking.
The researchers want to emphasize that the scale and extent of ocean heating is not simply the result of a natural weather phenomenon known as El Niño, which was declared in June 2023.
“Sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific clearly reflect El Niño, but sea surface temperatures in other parts of the world have remained unusually high for the past 10 months,” Professor Sauro explains.
“This is alarming and cannot be explained by El Niño alone.”
Unusually warm ocean waters may also have been a factor in what was an unusual month for Antarctic sea ice. The lowest minimum extent in the satellite era has occurred three times in the past three years.
Scientists are having a hard time explaining exactly what’s going on.
Until 2017, Antarctic sea ice had defied predictions of shrinking, unlike in the Arctic, where the trend was more pronounced.
Recent apparent changes, occurring at the same time as other records around the world are being broken, are adding to concerns that Antarctic sea ice is finally waking up to climate change.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” Professor Martin Siegert, a glaciologist at the University of Exeter, told BBC News.
“It’s absolutely terrifying. The record just broke.” [the] scale. ”
The end of El Niño is in sight
There are signs that the global temperature record may finally be coming to an end in the coming months.
The 2023-24 El Niño event will be one of the five strongest of its kind on record, but its strength is gradually weakening, the World Meteorological Organization said on Tuesday. be.
El Niño will continue to influence temperatures and weather patterns in the coming months.
“We would expect [El Niño] “Temperatures in 2024 will continue to rise for at least the first half of the year,” Dr Colin Morris, a senior researcher at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, told BBC News.
However, according to the US scientific agency NOAA, the Pacific switch to neutrality is likely between April and June, and the switch to a colder period known as La Niña is likely to occur between June and August. It is possible that it will happen in between.
This will likely cause global temperatures to rise temporarily as less heat escapes from the colder eastern Pacific ocean surface and warms the air.
But as long as human activities continue to emit large amounts of greenhouse gases, temperatures will continue to rise in the long term, eventually leading to more records and extreme weather events.
Dr Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, said: “We know what we need to do: stop burning fossil fuels and replace them with more sustainable and renewable energy sources.” says.
“Unless we do that, extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change will continue to destroy lives and livelihoods.”