Average global temperature in March was 1.6C higher than in pre-industrial times, threatening that international climate goals are moving out of reach.
Global temperatures hovered at historic highs last month, and Europe experienced its warmest March, suggesting international climate goals could be moving out of reach.
The average temperature in March in Europe climbed to above 6 degrees Celsius (42.8 Fahrenheit), which is 0.26C (0.468F) above the previous hottest March in 2014. The average global temperature last month was 1.6C (2.88F) higher than in pre-industrial times, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said on Tuesday.
The findings, contained in C3S’s monthly report, underscore growing concerns that the international goal of limiting global warming by the year 2100 to 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial levels is slipping out of reach.
Scientists have warned that every fraction of a degree of global warming increases the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events such as heatwaves, heavy rainfall and droughts.
Samantha Burgess, strategic lead at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which runs the C3S service, noted that Europe experienced extremes in both heavy rain and drought in March.
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Europe last month recorded “many areas experiencing their driest March on record and others their wettest March on record for at least the past 47 years”, Burgess said.
Scientists said climate change also intensified an extreme heatwave across Central Asia and fuelled conditions for extreme rainfall in countries like Argentina.
Arctic sea ice also fell to its lowest monthly extent last month for any March in the 47-year record of satellite data, C3S said. The previous three months also set record lows.
The EU monitor uses billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations to aid its climate calculations. Its records go back to 1940.
The main driver of climate change is greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, according to climate scientists.
But even as the costs of disasters due to climate change spiral, the political will to invest in curbing emissions has waned in some countries.
United States President Donald Trump has called climate change a “hoax”, despite the global scientific consensus that it is human-caused and will have severe consequences if not addressed.
In January, Trump signed an executive order to have the US withdraw from the landmark Paris climate agreement, dealing a blow to worldwide efforts to combat global warming and once again distancing the US from its closest allies.
In 2015, nearly 200 nations agreed in Paris that limiting warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels offered the best chance of preventing the most catastrophic repercussions of climate change.
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However, Trump’s order says the Paris accord is among a number of international agreements that do not reflect US values and “steer American taxpayer dollars to countries that do not require, or merit, financial assistance in the interests of the American people”.
Friederike Otto of the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London told the AFP news agency that the world is “firmly in the grip of human-caused climate change”.
“That we’re still at 1.6C above pre-industrial is indeed remarkable,” she said.