Paris:
Last month was the world’s warmest February on record, the European climate monitor said on Thursday, marking the ninth consecutive month of historically high temperatures as climate change takes the world into “uncharted territory”.
Last year, human-caused climate change – an intensification of the naturally occurring El Niño weather phenomenon – caused global warming to reach its hottest levels in more than 100,000 years, with frequent storms, blighted crops and devastating fires.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said last month that between February 2023 and January 2024, for the first time, the Earth will experience temperatures 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than in the pre-industrial era for 12 consecutive months.
It confirmed in its latest monthly update that the trend was continuing, with temperatures throughout February 1.77C higher than the monthly estimate for the pre-industrial reference period 1850 to 1900.
In February, temperatures soared across large swaths of the world from Siberia to South America, and Europe experienced its second warmest winter on record.
Copernicus said global daily temperatures were “exceptionally high” in the first half of this month, with four consecutive days averaging 2 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial times. Just a few months ago, for the first time, the world experienced single-day temperatures above this extreme situation.
C3S director Carlo Buontempo said it was the longest sustained period of above 2C on record, adding that the high temperatures were “pretty alarming”.
But that doesn’t mean there’s a breach of the 2015 Paris climate agreement’s limit of “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, preferably 1.5 degrees Celsius, which has been measured over decades.
Copernicus has direct data from around the globe dating back to the 1940s, but Buontempo said that given what scientists know about historical temperatures, “our civilization has never had to deal with this climate.”
“In that sense, I think the definition of uncharted territory is appropriate,” he told AFP, adding that global warming had serious consequences for “our cities, our culture, our transportation systems, our energy systems.” ” poses an unprecedented challenge.
ocean record
Copernicus said sea surface temperatures reached their warmest month on record, breaking the extreme heat seen in August 2023, reaching a new high of just over 21 degrees Celsius at the end of the month.
Since the beginning of the industrial age, oceans have covered 70% of the Earth, absorbing 90% of the excess heat generated by carbon pollution from human activities, keeping the Earth’s surface habitable.
Warmer ocean temperatures mean more moisture in the atmosphere, leading to increasingly erratic weather, such as high winds and heavy rainfall.
The periodic El Niño phenomenon, which warms sea surfaces in the South Pacific and contributes to warmer global weather, is expected to disappear by early summer, Buentambo said.
He added that a shift toward a cooling La Niña could occur sooner than expected, which could reduce the likelihood of another record-breaking year in 2024.
fossil fuel heat
While El Niño and other influences have played a role in the recent unprecedented heat, scientists stress that humans’ continued emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere are to blame.
The United Nations IPCC climate panel warned that world temperatures could plummet by 1.5 degrees Celsius in the early 2030s.
Earth-heating emissions, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, continue to rise, and scientists say they need to be cut by nearly half within this decade.
At last year’s United Nations climate talks in Dubai, countries agreed to triple global renewable energy capacity within a decade and “move away” from fossil fuels.
But the deal lacks important details, and governments are now under pressure to strengthen climate commitments in the short term and beyond 2030.
“We know what to do – stop burning fossil fuels and replace them with more sustainable renewable energy sources,” said Friedrich Otto of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London.
“Unless we do this, extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change will continue to destroy lives and livelihoods.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
