April
breaks global temperature record, marking seven months of new highs
Latest
monthly figures add to string of recent temperature records and all
but assure 2016 will be hottest year on record
Monday 16 May 2016
01.28 BST Last modified on Monday 16 May 2016 03.08 BST
April 2016 was the
hottest April on record globally – and the seventh month in a row
to have broken global temperature records.
The latest figures
smashed the previous record for April by the largest margin ever
recorded.
It makes three
months in a row that the monthly record has been broken by the
largest margin ever, and seven months in a row that are at least 1C
above the 1951-80 mean for that month. When the string of
record-smashing months started in February, scientists began talking
about a “climate emergency”.
Figures released by
Nasa over the weekend show the global temperature of land and sea was
1.11C warmer in April than the average temperature for April during
the period 1951-1980.
It all but assures
that 2016 will be the hottest year on record, and probably by the
largest margin ever.
The new record broke
the previous one by 0.24C, which was set in 2010, at 0.87C above the
baseline average for April. That record itself broke one set three
years earlier at 0.75C above the baseline average for April.
The current blast of
hot air around the globe is being spurred by a massive El Niño,
which is a release of warm water across the Pacific Ocean. But it’s
not the biggest El Niño on record and that spike in temperatures is
occurring over a background of rapid global warming, pushing
temperatures to all-time highs.
“The interesting
thing is the scale at which we’re breaking records,” said Andy
Pitman, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System
Science at the University of New South Wales in Australia. “It’s
clearly all heading in the wrong direction.
“Climate
scientists have been warning about this since at least the 1980s. And
it’s been bloody obvious since the 2000s. So where’s the
surprise?” said Pitman.
Pitmans said the
recent figures put the recent goal agreed in Paris of just 1.5C
warming in doubt. “The 1.5C target, it’s wishful thinking. I
don’t know if you’d get 1.5C if you stopped emissions today.
There’s inertia in the system. It’s putting intense pressure on
2C,” he said.
The record
temperatures were wreaking havoc with ecosystems around the world.
They’ve triggered the third recorded global coral bleaching, and in
Australia 93% of the reefs have been affected by bleaching along the
2,300km Great Barrier Reef. In the northern parts of the reef, it’s
expected the majority of coral is dead, and on some reefs over 90% of
the coral is dying.
A recent analysis
showed the bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef was made 175 times
more likely because of climate change, and the conditions that caused
it would be average in fewer than 20 years.
The April figures
come as the symbolic milestone of CO2 concentrations of 400 parts per
million (ppm) have been broken at the important Cape Grim measuring
station in Tasmania, Australia.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário