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La Nina return could reduce extreme heat risks for 2024: scientists
La Nina return could reduce extreme heat risks for 2024: scientists
by AFP Staff Writers
Paris (AFP) March 7, 2024

The rapid return of the La Nina weather phenomenon "may actually decrease" the risk that 2024 smashes last year's record heat, Europe's climate monitor told AFP, amid enduring historic global temperatures.

Although the past nine consecutive months have clocked temperatures previously unseen by humanity, it fell in line with climatologists' predictions of human-caused climate change which "could have taken more into account", said Carlo Buontempo of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).

- Heating factors -

Contributors to the successive record temperatures range from natural cyclical events like the warming El Nino weather pattern and solar activity, Buontempo said, to greenhouse gas emissions.

"Greenhouse gases keep going up. And it would be very hard to explain or to see temperatures so high if it weren't for the greenhouse gases added in the atmosphere," he said.

The recent "El Nino has not been as extreme as previous El Ninos and still the top temperatures we have seen were remarkably warmer," he said.

It followed a lengthy cooling La Nina, which he said may have downplayed the extent the planet was warming.

- Weather patterns -

Despite El Nino peaking in December, February marked another month of record heat -- a typical pattern as global mean temperatures spike after the extreme of the weather pattern, Buontempo explained.

A transition to neutral is expected by the end of the Northern Hemisphere's spring and then to La Nina over the summer, he said, adding: "there are some indications suggesting a transition to La Nina is happening faster than expected".

It means while 2024 "was on track to become another very warm year, potentially a record-breaking year... the chance may actually decrease," he said.

- Paris accord breached -

In February, the planet saw four straight days exceed the 2-degrees Celsius mark above pre-industrial levels, the upper limit of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming.

While breached, the Paris target is actually measured by "an average over 20 years", Buontempo said.

The 2C threshold was first crossed in November, which was "remarkable and at the same time not really surprising".

Global temperatures have been consistently rising and "this means that temperature extremes will be exceeded more frequently at the daily level, at the monthly level, at the annual level", he said.

"The last 12 months have been above 1.5 (degrees) and this is the first time that exceeds that threshold."

- Uncharted territory -

While temperatures are still "broadly" consistent with scientists' projections, the climate has entered uncharted territory, Buontempo said.

"Our civilisation has never had to cope with this climate. Our cities, our culture, our transport system, our energy system -- none of those things ever had to cope with this climate," he said.

"Indeed, there have been surprises in the last few months, of things that we didn't know were going to happen so fast."

But, he added, "if you look at the projections made at the beginning of the century for the temperature of the 2020s, they were actually quite accurate. We could have taken more notice of those."

- Warming oceans -

Much of the planet's excess heat from climate change is being stored in the oceans, which are "acting as a dump for the extra energy and carbon", Buontempo said.

"We do know that this imbalance is actually accelerating."

However, current measurements remain "within the realm" of projections, albeit on the high side, he said, adding that 2023 was at least meeting "what was considered plausible 20 or 30 years ago".

February marks 9th straight month of record-smashing global heat: climate monitor
Paris (AFP) March 7, 2024 - Last month was the warmest February on record globally, the ninth straight month of historic high temperatures across the planet as climate change steers the world into "uncharted territory", Europe's climate monitor said Thursday.

The last year has seen an onslaught of storms, crop-withering drought and devastating fires, as human-caused climate change -- intensified by the naturally-occurring El Nino weather phenomenon -- stoked warming to likely the hottest levels in over 100,000 years.

Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) service last month said the period from February 2023 to January 2024 marked the first time Earth had endured 12 consecutive months of temperatures 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than the pre-industrial era.

That trend has continued, it confirmed in its latest monthly update, with February as a whole 1.77C warmer than the monthly estimate for 1850-1900, the pre-industrial reference period.

Temperatures spiked across swathes of the planet in February, from Siberia to South America, with Europe also registering its second warmest winter on record.

In the first half of the month, daily global temperatures were "exceptionally high", Copernicus said, with four consecutive days registering averages 2C higher than pre-industrial times -- just months after the world registered its first single day above that limit.

This was the longest streak over 2C on record, said C3S director Carlo Buontempo, adding the heat was "remarkable".

But it does not mark a breach of the 2015 Paris climate deal limit of "well below" 2C and preferably 1.5C, which is measured over decades.

Copernicus' direct data from across the planet goes back to the 1940s, but Buontempo said that taking into account what scientists know about historical temperatures "our civilization has never had to cope with this climate".

"In that sense, I think the definition of uncharted territory is appropriate," he told AFP, adding global warming posed an unprecedented challenge to "our cities, our culture, our transport system, our energy system".

- Ocean records -

Sea surface temperatures were the highest for any month on record, Copernicus said, smashing the previous heat extremes seen in August 2023 with a new high of just over 21C at the end of the month.

Oceans cover 70 percent of the planet and have kept the Earth's surface liveable by absorbing 90 percent of the excess heat produced by the carbon pollution from human activity since the dawn of the industrial age.

Hotter oceans mean more moisture in the atmosphere, leading to increasingly erratic weather, like fierce winds and powerful rain.

The cyclical El Nino, which warms the sea surface in the southern Pacific leading to hotter weather globally, is expected to fizzle out by early summer, Buontempo said.

He added that the transition to the cooling La Nina phenomenon may happen faster than expected, potentially decreasing the chances that 2024 will be another record-breaking year.

- Fossil fuelled heat-

While the El Nino and other effects have played a role in the unprecedented recent heat, scientists stressed that the greenhouse gas emissions that humans continue to pump into the atmosphere were the main culprit.

The UN's IPCC climate panel has warned that the world will likely crash through 1.5C in the early 2030s.

Planet-heating emissions, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, continue to rise when scientists say they need to fall by almost half this decade.

Countries at UN climate negotiations in Dubai last year agreed to triple global renewables capacity this decade and "transition away" from fossil fuels.

But the deal lacked important details, with governments now under pressure to strengthen their climate commitments in the short term and for beyond 2030.

"We know what to do -- stop burning fossil fuels and replace them with more sustainable, renewable sources of energy," said Friederike Otto, of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, Imperial College London.

"Until we do that, extreme weather events intensified by climate change will continue to destroy lives and livelihoods."

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