Halfway into February and the month has already damaged a number of temperature data, newest information reveals, following a trajectory of final 12 months that ended as the most well liked ever, and the 12 months resulting in February 2024 that witnessed a warming of 1.52°C above the pre-industrial common.

The floor air temperature on February 9, the newest for when information is offered, was 13.7°C — an anomaly of 1.3°C — making it the most well liked February day in recorded historical past and narrowly lacking the Paris Agreement threshold of 1.5°C.

The February 9 temperature was nearly a level larger than the 12.8°C recorded on the identical date final 12 months, information from University of Maine’s ClimateReanalyser confirmed.

The excessive temperature follows the storms, droughts, wildfires and excessive winter in components of the world because the local weather disaster, supercharged by the naturally occurring El Nino phenomenon that set in final 12 months, stoked report warming in 2023, making it doubtless the most well liked calendar 12 months up to now 100,000 years.

The common temperatures in six of the final seven months — July 2023, September 2023, October 2023, November 2023, December 2023, and January 2024 — had been above the 1.5°C threshold. Two months – March 2023 and August 2023 – barely missed the 1.5°C threshold, clocking in a median of 1.49°C.

The warmth excessive was additionally noticed within the world oceans, with the ocean floor temperature on the identical day setting a brand new report — common temperature reached 21.2°C.

While the temperature has fallen since then, it has caught above the 21°C mark, indicating the quantity of warmth the seas have absorbed and foreshadowing a a lot hotter 12 months forward even when the El Nino that set in final 12 months transitions to a La Nina as the newest projections present.

“The ocean heat content is at an all-time high. As that heat is released into the atmosphere, expect global temperatures overall to continue to spike in 2024. It is almost certain that 2024 will break the 1.5C barrier for the full year, and may even breach 1.6C,” Eliot Jacobson, retired professor of arithmetic and laptop science, stated in an electronic mail interview.

The ocean absorbs 90% of the warmth attributable to human-driven local weather change. At the start of the 12 months, the temperature has already spiked to 0.8°C above the pre-industrial common.

The rise in current weeks has put the planet heading in the right direction for two°C of warming above the pre-industrial ranges, Berkeley Earth scientist Zeke Hausfather informed The Guardian.

“I’d say February 2024 is an odds-on favourite to beat the prior record set in 2016, but it’s by no means a foregone conclusion at this point as weather models suggest that global temperatures will fall back down in the coming week,” he stated, highlighting that the behaviour of the local weather had change into extra erratic and tougher to forecast.