World’s ‘exceptional’ heat streak lengthens into March

PARIS: Global temperatures hovered at historic highs in March, the EU agency that monitors climate change said on Tuesday, prolonging an unprecedented heat streak that has pushed the bounds of scientific explanation.

In Europe, it was the hottest March ever recorded by a significant margin, said the Copernicus Climate Change Service. That drove rainfall extremes across a continent warming faster than any other, as planet-heating fossil fuel emissions keep rising.

The world meanwhile saw the second-hottest March in the Copernicus dataset, sustaining a near-unbroken spell of record or near-record-breaking temperatures that has persisted since July 2023.

Since then, virtually every month has been at least 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than it was before the industrial revolution, when humans began burning massive amounts of coal, oil and gas.

March was 1.6C above pre-industrial times, extending an anomaly so unusual that scientists are still trying to fully explain it.

“That we’re still at 1.6C above preindustrial is indeed remarkable,” said Friederike Otto of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London. “We’re very firmly in the grip of human-caused climate change,” she said.

Scientists had predicted the extreme run of global temperatures would subside after a warming El Nino event peaked in early 2024, but they have stubbornly lingered well into 2025. “We are still experiencing extremely high temperatures worldwide. This is an exceptional situation,” Robert Vautard, a leading scientist with the United Nations’ climate expert panel IPCC, said.

‘Climate breakdown’

Scientists warn 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.

Climate change is not just about rising temperatures but the knock-on effect of all that extra heat being trapped in the atmosphere and seas by greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane. Warmer seas mean higher evaporation and greater moisture in the atmosphere, causing heavier deluges and feeding energy into storms.

This also affects global rainfall patterns. March in Europe was 0.26C above the previous hottest record for the month set in 2014, Copernicus said.

Some parts of the continent experienced the “driest March on record and others their wettest” for about half a century, said Samantha Burgess of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which runs the Copernicus climate monitor.

Bill McGuire, a climate scientist from University College London, said the contrasting extremes “shows clearly how a destabilised climate means more and bigger weather extremes”. “As climate breakdown progresses, more broken records are only to be expected,” he said.

Concerns over the global economy were dominating headlines at a time when India was enduring scorching heat and Australia was swamped by floods, said Helen Clarkson, CEO of Climate Group. “The threat to the planet is existential, but our attention is elsewhere,” Clarkson said.

The global heat surge pushed 2023 and then 2024 to be the hottest years on record. Last year was also the first full calendar year to exceed 1.5C — the safer warming limit agreed by most nations under the Paris climate accord.

This single year breach does not represent a permanent crossing of the 1.5C threshold, which is measured over decades.

Published in Dawn, April 9th, 2025