March saw 10th straight month of record global heat: monitor
BRUSSELS
Europe's climate monitor said on April 9 that March was the hottest on record and the tenth straight month of historic heat, with sea surface temperatures also hitting a "shocking" new high.
It is the latest red flag in a year already marked by climate extremes and rising greenhouse gas emissions, spurring fresh calls for more rapid action to limit global warming.
Every month since June 2023 has beaten its own "hottest ever" tag, and March 2024 was no exception.
The EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said that March globally was 1.68 degrees Celsius hotter than an average March between the years 1850-1900, the reference period for the pre-industrial era.
The March record was only broken by 0.1C but it is the broader trend that was more alarming, said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of C3S.
Huge swathes of the planet endured above-average temperatures in March, from parts of Africa to Greenland, South America and Antarctica.
It was not only the tenth consecutive month to break its own heat record, but capped the hottest 12-month period on the books, 1.58C above pre-industrial averages.
This doesn't mean the 1.5C warming limit agreed by world leaders in Paris in 2015 has been breached. That is measured in decades, not individual years.
Nonetheless "the reality is that we're extraordinarily close, and already on borrowed time," Burgess told AFP.
The UN's IPCC climate panel has warned that the world will likely crash through 1.5C in the early 2030s.
The story at sea was no less "shocking", Burgess said, with a new record for global ocean surface temperature set in February eclipsed once again in March.
"That's incredibly unusual," she said.
Oceans cover 70 percent of the planet and have kept the Earth's surface liveable by absorbing 90 percent of the excess heat produced by the carbon pollution from human activity since the dawn of the industrial age.
Hotter oceans mean more moisture in the atmosphere, scientists say the air can generally hold around seven percent more water vapour for every 1C of temperature rise.
This leads to increasingly erratic weather, like fierce winds and powerful rain.
"We know the warmer our global atmosphere is, the more extreme events we'll have, the worse they will be, the more intense they will be," Burgess told AFP.
Copernicus said the cyclical El Nino climate pattern, which warms the sea surface in the Pacific Ocean, leading to hotter weather globally, continued to weaken in March.
But its "warming effect" alone did not explain the dramatic spikes witnessed this past year and projections for the coming months still indicated above-average temperatures, Burgess said.
