March Marks Yet Another Record In Global Heat

According to the European Union, Earth has reached its warmest March on record, capping a 10-month streak in which every month set a new temperature record. Reuters reports: Each of the last 10 months ranked as the world's hottest on record, compared with the corresponding month in previous years, the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a monthly bulletin. The 12 months ending with March also ranked as the planet's hottest ever recorded 12-month period, C3S said. From April 2023 to March 2024, the global average temperature was 1.58 degrees Celsius above the average in the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period.

C3S' dataset goes back to 1940, which the scientists cross-checked with other data to confirm that last month was the hottest March since the pre-industrial period. Already, 2023 was the planet's hottest year in global records going back to 1850. El Nino peaked in December-January and is now weakening, which may help to break the hot streak toward the end of the year. But despite El Nino easing in March, the world's average sea surface temperature hit a record high, for any month on record, and marine air temperatures remained unusually high, C3S said. 'The main driver of the warming is fossil fuel emissions,' said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London's Grantham Institute. Failure to reduce these emissions will continue to drive the warming of the planet, resulting in more intense droughts, fires, heatwaves and heavy rainfall, Otto said.

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