The past three days could have been the three hottest days in Earth’s modern history, scientists said on Thursday, as a staggering global warming continues to smash temperature records from North America to Antarctica.
The spike comes as forecasters warn that Earth could be entering a period of many years of exceptional warmth driven by two main factors: continued emissions of heat-trapping gases, mainly due to man-made burning of oil, gas and coal; and the return of El Niño, a cyclical weather pattern.
And in the North Atlantic, the ocean is hot off the charts. Surface temperature in May is 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.6 degrees Celsius, warmer than usual for this time of year, breaking previous records by an unusually large margin.
Soaring temperatures have alarmed even scientists monitoring climate change.
“It’s so different from what’s been observed that you can hardly understand it,” said Brian McNoldy, a senior research scientist at the University of Miami. “It doesn’t seem real.”
On Tuesday, the average global temperature rose to 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 17 degrees Celsius, making it the Hottest day Earth has experienced at least since 1940when the record began, and most likely before, according to an analysis by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Since that is an average, regions of the world feel that extra heat more strongly. In the Southern United States and Northern Mexico, for example, where the heat index has hit triple digits, climate change has caused the ongoing heatwave to be about 5 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than before. according to scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.
The planet’s global warming is “very well within what scientists have predicted” as humans, said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth and payments. continues to pump large amounts of heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Stripe company.
Overall, the Earth has warmed by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the 19th century and will continue to get hotter until humans basically prevent all emissions from fossil fuels and prevent deforestation.
But other factors that lay on top of anthropogenic warming may have contributed to the dramatic rise in temperatures in recent months. For example, a cyclical phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean called El Nino-Southern Oscillation causes annual fluctuations by transferring heat in and out of deeper ocean layers. Global surface temperatures tend to be cooler during La Niña years and hotter during El Niño years.
Dr Hausfather said: “An important reason we are seeing so many records broken is that we are transitioning from an unusual three-year La Niña period, which lowers temperatures, to strong El Niño phenomenon.
That likely foreshadows more heat to come. The current El Niño is just starting to unfold, and many researchers don’t expect it to peak until December or January, with global temperatures spiking in the months that follow. That means next year could be even hotter than this year, scientists say.
Other dynamics may also be at work. The North Atlantic has experienced a record heatwave since early March, before the El Niño phenomenon began. One factor could be a subtropical high-pressure system known as the Azores High that weakened the winds that blow over the ocean and curbed the amount of dust blowing from the Sahara, which normally helps cool the oceans.
Those weather patterns could change in the coming weeks, said Dr McNoldy of the University of Miami. “But even then, we will probably go from extremely record-breaking temperatures to extremely record-breaking,” he said.
The soaring heat has prompted some meteorologists to raise their warnings for this year’s hurricane season. On Thursday, forecasters at Colorado State University said they now expect an above-average Atlantic hurricane season, with about 18 tropical cyclones, a reversal from previous forecasts for a quieter-than-normal year. Atlantic hurricanes are usually quelled during El Niño years, but that may not be the case this year due to unusually warm ocean waters, which can cause hurricanes.
other researchers success that recent efforts to clean up sulfur pollution from ships around the world may be pushing the temperature up a bit, as sulfur dioxide tends to reflect sunlight and cool the planet a bit. . However, that exact impact is still up for debate.
“There seems to be an unusual convergence of warming factors at the moment,” said Gabriel Vecchi, a climate scientist at Princeton. “But all of this is happening in a world where we’ve been increasing our greenhouse gas emissions for the last 150 years, and that’s really challenging and makes it more likely that we’ll be pushed into destructive territory. record.”
