World’s ‘exceptional’ heat streak lengthens into March

PARIS: Global temperatures hovered at historic highs in March, the EU agency that monitors climate change said on Tuesday, 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. That drove rainfall extremes across a continent warming faster than any other, as planet-heating fossil fuel emissions keep rising.

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 hotter than it was before the industrial revolution, when humans began burning massive amounts of coal, oil and gas.

March was 1.6C above pre-industrial times, extending an anomaly so unusual that scientists are still trying to fully explain it. “That we´re still at 1.6C 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.