The climate has become unpredictable and shocks meteorologists – Even in the Atlantic where hurricanes form, February is as warm as it usually is in mid-July
An alarming study of the climate’s trajectory around the globe is published by the British network The Guardian in which it is reported that February is on course to break all heat records as human-induced global warming and El Niño push up temperatures on land and in oceans around the world.
A little more than halfway through the shortest month of the year, the warming spike has become so intense that climate charts now include new areas, particularly for sea surface temperatures that have persisted and accelerated to the point where expert observers are struggling to explain how the change is occurring.
“The planet is warming at an accelerating rate.
We are seeing rapid increases in ocean temperatures,” said Dr Joel Hirschi, deputy head of marine systems modelling at the UK’s National Oceanography Centre.
“The extent to which previous sea surface temperature records were broken in 2023 and now in 2024 is beyond prediction, although understanding why this is happening is a matter of ongoing research.”
The first eight days of February 2024 were the warmest ever recorded – Graph source: The Guardian
Humanity is on track to experience the warmest February in recorded history, following record-breaking January, December, November, November, October, September, August, July, June and May, according to Berkeley geologist Zeke Housfather.
He said the rise in recent weeks is on track for a warming of 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, although this should be the short, maximum effect of El Niño if it follows the path of previous years and starts to cool in the coming months.
Financial Times: Greek entrepreneur Haris Karonis & JP Morgan are involved in facing counterclaims
Last week, monitoring stations in places as far away as South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan, Colombia, Japan, North Korea, Maldives, North Korea and Belize recorded monthly record-breaking heat.
In the first half of this month, Herrera said 140 countries broke monthly heat records, which was similar to the final figures for the last six record hottest months of 2023 and more than triple the number of any month before 2023.
