Hottest February on record
These temperatures saw particularly severe heat afflict western Australia, southeast Asia, southern Africa and South America.
Last month was the planet’s hottest February on record, marking the ninth month in a row that global records tumbled, according to new data from Copernicus, the European Union’s climate monitoring service.
February was 1.77 degrees Celsius warmer than the average February in pre-industrial times, Copernicus found, and it capped off the hottest 12-month period in recorded history, at 1.56 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
It’s yet another grim climate change milestone, as the long-term impacts of human-caused global warming are given a boost by El Niño, a natural climate fluctuation.
Carbon dioxide concentrations are at their highest level for at least two million years, according to the UN’s climate body, and increased by near-record levels again over the past year.
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.
This breaks the previous record, from 2016, by around 0.12C.
These temperatures saw particularly severe heat afflict western Australia, southeast Asia, southern Africa and South America.
Recent records haven’t just been limited to air temperatures. Countless climate metrics are far beyond levels seen in modern times.
The 12-month average now sits at 1.56C above pre-industrial levels – after the first year-long breach of 1.5C warming was confirmed last month.
Back in 2015 in Paris, nearly 200 countries agreed to try to keep the rise in warming under 1.5C, to help avoid some of the worst climate impacts.
That threshold in the Paris agreement is generally accepted to mean a 20-year average – so it hasn’t yet been broken – but the relentless string of records illustrates how close the world is getting to doing so.
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