London, Mar. 7, (dpa/GNA) – February became the ninth month in a row to set record-high global temperatures, EU scientists said on Thursday.
The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said the world had its warmest February on record last month.
The surface air temperature averaged 13.54 degrees Celsius, which was 0.81 degrees above the average for the previous 30 years. It was also 0.12 degrees higher than the previous warmest February ever measured in 2016.
The Earth logged its warmest year ever in 2023, overtaking 2016 by a large margin.
Copernicus announced in January that global warming had now exceeded 1.5 degrees on average for the first time over a period of 12 months – February 2023 to January 2024 – compared to the pre-industrial era.
But this does not yet mean that the 1.5-degree goal set in the 2015 Paris Agreement has been exceeded, as a long-term average is used to determine the benchmark.
The data used by Copernicus goes back to 1950, but some earlier data is also available.
The European Union’s Copernicus climate service regularly publishes data on the Earth’s surface temperature, sea ice cover and precipitation. The findings are based on computer-generated analyses that incorporate billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations around the world.
GNA