New Delhi: May 2024 is set to become the 12th consecutive month to break the monthly global temperature record. Data shows that for the last 11 months, a global monthly record has been broken.
Data from Berkeley Earth, a US-based non-profit focused on land temperature data analysis for climate science, shows that there is an above 95 percent possibility of May 2024 becoming the warmest May on record.
“With half the month of data in, it is very likely (>95 percent chance) that May 2024 will be the warmest May on record, extending the streak of record-breaking months to 12 in a row,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist working with Berkeley Earth, told ThePrint.
He also said that global temperatures had been trending downward since the El-Nino conditions peaked earlier this year.
“If this trend continues, global temperatures will likely fall out of record territory in June. But we still don’t fully understand the exceptional warmth in the second half of 2023, so any predictions at this point should be treated cautiously,” Hausfather said.
El Niño and La Niña are two phases of the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, phenomenon in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. The El Niño phase is marked by warmer temperatures, while La Niña refers to a cooling period. The current extreme heat recordings globally are being attributed to the ongoing El Niño conditions. According to climate scientists, these are expected to abate by August-September.
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Record-breaking heat trends
Extremely high temperatures have been recorded globally for the last 11 months.
According to an analysis by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the global average surface air temperatures have been warmer than in any previous April since 1940.
“April 2024 is the eleventh consecutive month, being the warmest for the respective month of the year. It is unusual, but a similar streak of monthly global temperature records happened already in 2015/2016. The month was 1.58 degrees Celsius warmer than an estimate of the April average for the pre-industrial reference period (1850-1900),” the analysis said.
Before this, March 2024 also broke the record for being the warmest March in history.
The trend goes back to 2023.
Earlier this year, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirmed that 2023 was the hottest year in the 174-year observational record.
“This shattered the record of the previous warmest years, 2016 at 1.29 +/- 0.12 degrees Celsius above the 1850–1900 average and 2020 at 1.27 +/- 0.13 degrees Celsius. The ten-year average 2014–2023 global temperature is 1.20 +/- 0.12 degrees Celsius above the 1850–1900 average,” WMO said in its observations.
The report added: “Globally, every month from June to December was record warm for the respective month. September 2023 was particularly noteworthy, surpassing the previous global record for September by a wide margin (0.46 to 0.54 degrees Celsius)”.
Last month, a rapid attribution analysis conducted by an international team of leading climate scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) highlighted the increasing heat burden worldwide. Experts warned that things will only get worse.
The report said that in South Asia, extreme heatwaves in April, with temperatures rising beyond 40 degrees Celsius, are 45 times more likely in the coming years, with these events becoming 0.85 degrees Celsius warmer because of climate change.
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