PARIS (AFP) – Global temperatures hovered at historic highs in March, Europe’s climate monitor said yesterday, prolonging an unprecedented heat streak that has pushed the bounds of scientific explanation.
In Europe, it was the hottest March ever recorded by a significant margin, said the Copernicus Climate Change Service, driving rainfall extremes across a continent warming faster than any other.
The world meanwhile saw the second-hottest March in the Copernicus dataset, sustaining a near-unbroken spell of record or near-record-breaking temperatures that has persisted since July 2023.
Since then, virtually every month has been at least 1.5 degrees Celsius (°C) hotter than it was before the industrial revolution, when humans began burning massive amounts of coal, oil and gas.
March was 1.6°C above pre-industrial times, extending an anomaly so unusual that scientists are still trying to fully explain it.
“That we’re still at 1.6°C above preindustrial is indeed remarkable,” said Friederike Otto of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London.
“We’re very firmly in the grip of human-caused climate change,” she told AFP.
Scientists had predicted the extreme run of global temperatures would subside after a warming El Nino event peaked in early 2024, but they have stubbornly lingered well into 2025.
“We are still experiencing extremely high temperatures worldwide. This is an exceptional situation,” leading scientist with the United Nations’ climate expert panel IPCC Robert Vautard told AFP.
Scientists warn that every fraction of a degree of global warming increases the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events such as heatwaves, heavy rainfall and droughts.
Climate change is not just about rising temperatures but the knock-on effect of all that extra heat being trapped in the atmosphere and seas by greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane.
Warmer seas mean higher evaporation and greater moisture in the atmosphere, causing heavier deluges and feeding energy into storms.
This also affects global rainfall patterns.
March in Europe was 0.26°C above the previous hottest record for the month set in 2014, Copernicus said.
Some parts of the continent experienced the “driest March on record and others their wettest” for about half a century, said Samantha Burgess of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which runs the Copernicus climate monitor.
