Global temperatures hovered at historic highs in March, Europe’s climate monitor said on Tuesday (Apr 8), prolonging an extraordinary heat streak that has tested scientific expectations.
In Europe, it was the hottest March ever recorded by a significant margin, said the Copernicus Climate Change Service, driving rainfall extremes across a continent warming faster than any other.
The world meanwhile saw the second-hottest March in the Copernicus dataset, sustaining a near-unbroken spell of record or near-record-breaking temperatures that has persisted since July 2023.
Since then, virtually every month has been at least 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than it was before the industrial revolution when humanity began burning massive amounts of coal, oil and gas.
March was 1.6 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, prolonging an anomaly so extreme that scientists are still trying to fully explain it.
“That we’re still at 1.6 degrees Celsius above preindustrial is indeed remarkable,” said Friederike Otto of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London.
“We’re very firmly in the grip of human-caused climate change,” she told AFP.
CONTRASTING EXTREMES
Scientists warn that every fraction of a degree of global warming increases the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events such as heatwaves, heavy rainfall and droughts.
Climate change is not just about rising temperatures but the knock-on effect of all that extra heat being trapped in the atmosphere and seas by greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane.
Warmer seas mean higher evaporation and greater moisture in the atmosphere, causing heavier deluges and feeding energy into cyclones, but also affecting global rainfall patterns.
