Climate experts sound the alarm as March 2024 sets 10th consecutive heat record

The European Climate Change Service Copernicus said that March 2024 broke the tenth consecutive temperature record, becoming the warmest month in the history of observations. This is reported by The Guardian.

According to data released by Copernicus, the global surface temperature in March was 0.1 °C higher than the previous record for the month, set in 2016, and 1.68 °C higher than the pre-industrial average.

Overall, over the past year, the global average temperature has been 1.58 °C above pre-industrial levels, exceeding the 1.5 °C average set as the maximum in the Paris Climate Agreement.

This sharp rise in temperature has raised concerns among scientists about a possible acceleration of warming.

Diana Urge-Vorsatz, a vice chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), claims that during the past 15 years, the planet has warmed by 0.3°C, nearly doubling the trend of 0.18°C per decade since the 1970s.

“Is this within the limits of climate variability or a signal of accelerated warming? My concern is that it may be too late if we just wait to see,” she said.

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies director Gavin Schmidt observed that temperatures are breaking records by 0.2°C each month.

He added that the likely causes of the anomaly include the El Niño effect, a decrease in the amount of cooling sulfur dioxide particles due to pollution control, precipitation from the eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Hapai volcano in Tonga in January 2022, and an increase in solar activity ahead of the predicted maximum sunshine.

However, based on a preliminary analysis, he stated that these factors are insufficient to explain the 0.2 °C temperature increase.

“If the anomaly does not stabilize by August, which is a reasonable expectation based on previous El Niño events, the world will be in uncharted territory. This could mean that the warming of the planet is already fundamentally changing the climate system much earlier than scientists expected,” Schmidt explained.

According to Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, in order to stop further warming, it is necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible.

On March 19, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced a red alert level as 2023 broke all major climate records, and 2024 could be even worse.

The UN weather agency stated in its annual global climate report that average temperatures achieved the highest level in 174 years of the history of observations, reaching 1.45 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Ocean temperatures are now the warmest in 65 years of data recording with over 90% of the seas having experienced heatwave during the year, the WMO reported. The global ocean warming impacts food systems, it added.