The global temperature monitoring service reported that March marked the warmest on record globally, concluding a streak of 10 consecutive months where each month set a new temperature record.
According to the European Union’s climate monitoring service, each of the last ten 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) reported that the 12 months ending with March also ranked as the planet’s hottest ever recorded 12-month period.
Reuters reported that from April 2023 to March 2024, the global average temperature exceeded the average in the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period by 1.58 degrees Celsius.
Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of C3S, told Reuters that the consistent pattern of setting temperature records month after month is a cause for significant concern, indicating a profound long-term trend in climate change.
Reuters reported that C3S’s dataset, which goes back to 1940, confirmed that last month was the hottest March since the pre-industrial period.
Global records dating back to 1850 marked 2023 as the warmest year on the planet.
Climate change-driven drought in the Amazon rainforest region unleashed a record number of wildfires in Venezuela from January-March, while drought in Southern Africa has wiped out crops and left millions of people facing hunger, according to Arabian Business.
Marine scientists also warned last month that a mass coral bleaching event, likely the worst in the planet’s history, is unfolding in the Southern Hemisphere, driven by warming waters.
C3S attributed the exceptional heat primarily to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, with factors like El Nino, the weather pattern that warms the surface waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean, also pushing up temperatures.
Despite El Nino easing in March, C3S reported that the world’s average sea surface temperature hit a record high for any month on record, and marine air temperatures remained unusually high.
