Last month was the world’s warmest February in modern times, the EU’s climate service says, extending the run of monthly records to nine in a row.
Each month since June 2023 has seen new temperature highs for the time of year.
The world’s sea surface is at its hottest on record, while Antarctic sea-ice has again reached extreme lows.
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Those warming gases helped make February 2024 about 1.77C warmer than “pre-industrial” times - before humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels - according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Researchers are keen to stress that the scale and extent of the oceanic heat is not simply a consequence of the natural weather event known as El Niño, which was declared in June 2023.
The apparent recent shift - occurring at the same time as other records are being broken around the planet - adds to concerns that Antarctic sea-ice may finally be waking up to climate change.
“We would expect [El Niño] to continue to keep 2024 temperatures elevated at least through the first half of the year,” Dr Colin Morice, a senior scientist at the UK’s Met Office Hadley Centre, told BBC News.
But as long as human activities keep releasing huge amounts of greenhouse gases, temperatures will continue rising in the long-term, ultimately leading to more records and extreme weather.
“We know what to do - stop burning fossil fuels and replace them with more sustainable, renewable sources of energy,” says Dr Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London.
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