Meteorologists have said that February is on course to break a record number of heat records, as human-made global heating and the natural El Niño climate pattern drive up temperatures on land and oceans around the world.
A little over halfway into the shortest month of the year, the heating spike has become so pronounced that climate charts are entering new territory, particularly for sea-surface temperatures that have persisted and accelerated to the point where expert observers are struggling to explain how the change is happening.
“The planet is warming at an accelerating rate. We are seeing rapid temperature increases in the ocean, the climate’s largest reservoir of heat,” said Dr Joel Hirschi, the associate head of marine systems modelling at the UK National Oceanography Centre. “The amplitude by which previous sea surface temperatures records were beaten in 2023 and now 2024 exceed expectations, though understanding why this is, is the subject of ongoing research.”
Humanity is on a trajectory to experience the hottest February in recorded history, after a record January, December, November, October, September, August, July, June and May, according to the Berkeley Earth scientist Zeke Hausfather.
He said that the rise in recent weeks was on course for 2C of warming above pre-industrial levels, though this should be the brief, peak impact of El Niño if it follows the path of previous years and starts to cool down in the months ahead.
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“That would normally be good news if a temperature-lowering La Niña follows, but Hausfather said the behaviour of the climate had become more erratic and harder to forecast. “[Last year] defied expectations so much that it’s hard to have as much confidence in the approaches we have used to make these predictions in the past,” he said.
Speaking further, he said “I’d say February 2024 is an odds-on favourite to beat the prior record set in 2016, but it’s by no means a foregone conclusion at this point as weather models suggest that global temperatures will fall back down in the coming week.
The first half of February shocked weather watchers. Maximiliano Herrera, who blogs on Extreme Temperatures Around the World, described the surge of thousands of meteorological station heat records as “insane”, “total madness” and “climatic history rewritten”. What astonished him was not just the number of records but the extent by which many of them surpassed anything that went before.
He said Morocco had seen 12 weather stations register over 33.9C, which was not only a national record for the hottest winter day, but also more than 5C above average for July. The northern Chinese city of Harbin had to close its winter ice festival because temperatures crept above freezing for an unprecedented three days this month.
In the past week, monitoring stations as far apart as South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Colombia, Japan, North Korea, the Maldives and Belize have registered monthly heat records.
In the first half of this month, Herrera said 140 countries broke monthly heat records, which was similar to the final figures of the last six record hottest months of 2023 and more than three times any month before 2023.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
