March 2024 was the warmest on record in global history, joining a streak of consecutive record high temperatures over the past ten months.
This was announced on Tuesday by the European Copernicus Observatory, also talking about a new monthly record of absolute sea temperature.
"The average global temperature over the past 12 months is the highest ever recorded. It's "1.58°C above pre-industrial levels" due to decades of greenhouse gas emissions — the effects of which are intensifying by mid-2023 due to El Niño," said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Climate Change Service ( C3S) at the European Copernicus Observatory.
If the anomaly does not stabilize by August, a reasonable expectation based on past El Niño events, then the world will be in uncharted territory, climate scientists point out.
This could mean that a warming planet is already fundamentally changing the way the climate system works, much faster than experts had predicted.
According to scientists, the core of the problem is primarily fossil fuel emissions.
Research of nearly 90,000 climate-related studies shows that humans are changing the climate by burning natural gas, oil, coal and trees.
Stopping further warming requires rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, Copernicus scientists point out.