(CN) — A record-breaking stretch of heat was extended to 10 months after March came in as the warmest ever measured globally, the European Union's climate agency said Tuesday.
In March, the global surface air temperature was 0.73 degrees Celsius (1.31 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than average, making it the warmest March on record globally, according to the Copernicus Climate Service. It was 0.10 C (0.18 F) warmer than the previous March record set in 2016.
“March 2024 continues the sequence of climate records toppling for both air temperature and ocean surface temperatures,” said Samantha Burgess, the Copernicus deputy director. “Stopping further warming requires rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.’’
This extraordinary warm stretch made 2023 the hottest year on record. Scientists say the record heat is linked in large part to the development of a moderately strong El Niño weather pattern in June 2023. El Niños are associated with warmer temperatures and more unpredictable and violent weather.
But some scientists are warning this record warming cannot be explained solely by the emergence of El Niño and that it has defied climate models. In a grim scenario, they warn the planet may be reaching a tipping point where the climate is warming even faster than previously predicted.
Compared to average temperatures prior to the industrial age and the burning of massive amounts of fossil fuels, this March was 1.68 C (3.02 F) warmer, Copernicus said. The average global temperature in March was 14.14 C (57.45 F).
Over the past 12 months, the planet was 0.70 C (1.26 F) warmer than the average temperature since 1991, a period Copernicus uses as a baseline for calculating averages in the industrial age. This makes it the warmest stretch ever recorded, the agency added.
Above-average temperatures for March were registered in Europe, eastern North America, Greenland, eastern Russia, Central America, parts of South America, many parts of Africa, southern Australia, and parts of Antarctica, Copernicus said.
The length and intensity of this heat spell is worrisome, scientists say.
“The observed temperature anomaly has not only been much larger than expected, but also started showing up several months before the onset of El Niño,” said Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in a recent Nature article.
He said sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean shot up in March 2023 and that the extent of sea ice around Antarctica had decreased to a record low by June last year. By then, the El Niño pattern was beginning to form and warm the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean.
“It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has,” he wrote.
“A general warming trend is expected because of rising greenhouse-gas emissions, but this sudden heat spike greatly exceeds predictions made by statistical climate models that rely on past observations,” he said. “Many reasons for this discrepancy have been proposed but, as yet, no combination of them has been able to reconcile our theories with what has happened.”
Other than El Niño, scientists are studying other possible factors for why it's been so hot.
Massive amounts of water vapor were shot into the sky in January 2022 when an underwater volcano erupted in Tonga and scientists say that vapor has added warmth to the stratosphere.
At the same time, the sun is in a more active phase in its solar cycle and this too has added some warmth to the atmosphere, Schmidt noted.
Another possible factor is a 2020 regulation forcing the shipping industry to burn fuels with fewer sulfur compounds. While the cleaner fuel is better for the environment, scientists say the drop in sulfur emissions actually may be adding to atmospheric heat because sulfur compounds reflect incoming sunlight.
Still, Schmidt said all these conditions, including El Niño, cannot account for the extreme heat.
“If the anomaly does not stabilize by August — a reasonable expectation based on previous El Niño events — then the world will be in uncharted territory,” he wrote. “It could imply that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated.”
Last month, the World Meteorological Organization said this El Niño peaked in December as one of the five strongest on record and that it was gradually weakening. The organization predicted above-normal temperatures over most of the planet into May.
Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.
Follow @cainburdeau
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