BRUSSELS –
The world just experienced the hottest April on record, extending an 11-month streak in which each month set a temperature record, the European Union’s climate change monitoring service said Wednesday.
Each month since June 2023 has been ranked as the hottest ever recorded on the planet, compared to the corresponding month in previous years, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a monthly bulletin.
Including April, the global average temperature was the highest on record in a 12-month period: 1.61 C above the average for the pre-industrial period of 1850-1900.
Some of the extremes, including months of record sea surface temperatures, have led scientists to investigate whether human activity has triggered a tipping point in the climate system.
“I think a lot of scientists have wondered if there could be a change in the climate system,” said Julien Nicolas, senior climate scientist at C3S.
Greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are the main cause of climate change. In recent months, the natural El Niño phenomenon, which warms the surface waters of the eastern Pacific Ocean, has also raised temperatures.
Climate extremes
Scientists have already confirmed that climate change caused some specific extreme weather events in April, including a heat wave in the Sahel linked to potentially thousands of deaths.
Hayley Fowler, a climate scientist at Newcastle University, said the data showed the world is dangerously close to breaching the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C.
“At what point do we declare that we have lost the battle to keep temperatures below 1.5ºC? My personal opinion is that we have already lost that battle, and we really need to think very seriously about keeping temperatures below 2ºC and reduce our emissions as quickly as we can,” he said.
Countries agreed to the 1.5C target at a UN climate summit in 2015. It is the level that scientists say would prevent the most disastrous consequences of warming, such as fatal heat, flooding and irreversible loss of ecosystems. .
Technically, the 1.5 C target has not yet been missed, as it refers to an average global temperature over decades. But some scientists have said the target can no longer realistically be met and have urged governments to reduce CO2 emissions faster to limit the overshoot.
The C3S data set dates back to 1940, and scientists compared it with other data to confirm that last month was the warmest April since the pre-industrial period.
(Reporting by Kate AbnettEditing by Bill Berkrot)