By Kate Abnett
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The world just experienced its warmest March on record, capping a streak of 10 consecutive months in which each month set a new temperature record, the country’s climate change monitoring service said on Tuesday. European Union.
Each of the last 10 months has been ranked as the warmest on record globally, compared to the corresponding month in previous years, the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a monthly bulletin.
The 12 months ending in March were also ranked as the warmest 12 months on record on the planet, C3S said. From April 2023 to March 2024, the global average temperature was 1.58 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial period average of 1850-1900.
“It’s the long-term trend with exceptional records that worries us a lot,” C3S deputy director Samantha Burgess told Reuters.
“Seeing data like this — month after month — really shows us that our climate is changing, it’s changing rapidly,” he added.
The C3S dataset dates back to 1940, and scientists compared it with other data to confirm that last month was the warmest March since the pre-industrial period.
2023 has already been the hottest year on the planet according to global records dating back to 1850.
Extreme weather and exceptional temperatures have wreaked havoc this year.
Drought caused by climate change in the Amazon rainforest region (NASDAQ:) sparked a record number of fires in Venezuela from January to March, while drought in southern Africa wiped out crops and left millions of people suffering hunger.
Marine scientists also warned last month that a mass coral bleaching event is likely occurring in the Southern Hemisphere, driven by warming waters, and could be the worst in the planet’s history.
The main cause of the exceptional heat was human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, C3S said. Other factors causing temperatures to rise include El Nino, the weather pattern that warms surface waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean.
El Nino peaked in December and January and is now weakening, which could help break the warm streak late in the year.
But despite the easing of El Nino in March, global average sea surface temperatures reached a record high, for any month on record, and sea air temperatures remained unusually high, C3S said.
“The main driver of warming is fossil fuel emissions,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London.
Failure to reduce these emissions will continue to drive global warming, resulting in more intense droughts, wildfires, heat waves and heavy rains, Otto said.