The exceptional
warmth that first enveloped the planet last summer is continuing strong into
2024: Last month clocked in as the hottest January ever measured, the European
Union climate monitor announced Thursday.
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It
was the hottest January on record for the oceans, too, according to the
European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Sea surface temperatures
were just slightly lower than in August 2023, the ocean’s warmest month on the
books. And sea temperatures kept on climbing in the first few days of February,
surpassing the daily records set last August.
The
oceans absorb the great majority of the extra heat that greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere trap near Earth’s surface, making them a reliable gauge of how much
and how quickly we are warming the planet. Warmer oceans provide more fuel for
hurricanes and atmospheric river storms and can disrupt marine life.
January
makes eight months in a row that average air temperatures, across the
continents as well as the seas, have topped all prior records for the time of
year. All in all, 2023 was Earth’s hottest year in more than a century and a
half.
The
principal driver of all this warmth is no mystery to scientists: The burning of
fossil fuels, deforestation, and other human activities have driven
temperatures steadily upward for more than a century. The current El Nino
weather cycle is also allowing more ocean heat to be released into the
atmosphere.
Yet
precisely why Earth has been this hot, for this long, in recent months remains
a matter of some debate among researchers, who are waiting for more data to
come in to see whether other, less predictable and perhaps less understood
factors might also be at work around the margins.
“Rapid
reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are the only way to stop global
temperatures increasing,” Samantha Burgess, Copernicus’ deputy director, said
in a statement.
According
to Copernicus’ data, temperatures in January were well above average in eastern
Canada, northwestern Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, though much of
the inland United States was colder than usual. Parts of South America were
warmer than normal and dry, contributing to the recent forest fires that
devastated central Chile.
The
intensity of recent underwater heat waves prompted the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration in December to add three new levels to its system of
ocean heat alerts to indicate where corals might be bleaching or dying.
An
El Nino pattern like the one currently observed in the Pacific is associated
with warmer years for the planet, as well as a swath of effects on rainfall and
temperatures in specific regions.
But
as humans heat the planet, the effects that forecasters could once confidently
expect El Nino to have on local temperatures are no longer so predictable, said
Michelle L’Heureux, a NOAA scientist who studies El Nino and its opposite
phase, La Nina.
“For
regions that previously tended to have below-average temperatures during El
Nino, you rarely see that anymore,” L’Heureux said. “You see something that’s
more near-average, or even still tilting above average.”
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