March marks 10th straight month of record global heat

Europe's climate monitor said Tuesday that March was the hottest on record and the 10th 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.

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 10th consecutive month to break its own heat record, but it also capped the hottest 12-month period on the books, 1.58 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial averages.

This doesn't mean the 1.5-degree Celsius warming limit agreed upon by world leaders in Paris in 2015 has been breached; as this threshold is measured in decades, not individual years.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that the world will likely crash through 1.5 degrees Celsius in the early 2030s.

Oceans cover 70 percent of the planet and have kept the Earth's surface livable by absorbing 90 percent of the excess heat produced by carbon pollution from human activity since the dawn of the industrial age.

Hotter oceans mean more moisture in the atmosphere, and scientists say the air can generally hold around seven percent more water vapor for every 1 degree Celsius of temperature rise.

This leads to increasingly erratic weather, like fierce winds and powerful rain.

Russia is reeling from some of its worst flooding in decades, while parts of Australia, Brazil and France experienced an exceptionally wet March.

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.

Copernicus records date back to 1940, but other sources of climate data, such as ice cores, tree rings and coral skeletons, allow scientists to expand their conclusions using evidence from much deeper in the past.

As climate records tumble, scientists are debating whether the extreme heat seen over the past year was within the bounds of what was forecast or was something more uncharted.

Humanity, meanwhile, continues to pump ever-more planet-heating emissions into the atmosphere, even as scientists say they need to fall by almost half this decade to keep the Paris goals within reach.

Levels of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide – the three main human-caused greenhouse gases – rose for another year in 2023, scientists from the US-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Friday.

(Cover via CFP)