Warmest March raises climate concern

The world is "very firmly in the grip of human-caused climate change", an environmental scientist has said, after data from Europe's climate monitor revealed that the continent had recorded its warmest March, extending a sustained period of record temperatures.

Friederike Otto, from the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London, said it was "remarkable" that figures showed that March was 1.6 degrees warmer than before the Industrial Revolution, keeping up a near-unbroken run of record-breaking readings dating back to July 2023.

This March was the warmest on record by a significant margin, 0.26 degrees above the previous monthly record set in 2014, which in addition to causing heat-related issues has led to erratic rainfall patterns.

Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate at the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service, or CCCS, said some areas of Europe had recorded their driest March on record, whereas others had experienced their wettest in nearly half a century.

The figures for March back up an alarming pattern noted by CCCS at the start of the year, when it reported that 2024 was the warmest year on record globally, and the first calendar year where average global temperatures had passed the symbolic milestone of being 1.5 degrees higher than preindustrial levels.

"All of the internationally produced global temperature datasets show that 2024 was the hottest year since records began in 1850," CCCS Director Carlo Buontempo said at the time.

Own destiny

"Humanity is in charge of its own destiny, but how we respond to the climate challenge should be based on evidence. The future is in our hands — swift and decisive action can still alter the trajectory of our future climate," he said.

Mauro Facchini, head of earth observation at the European Commission's Directorate-General for Defense Industry and Space, called the EU's environmental and climate targets "ambitious", but added that "with science, innovation and flagship programs in earth observation such as CCCS, we can make informed decisions to mitigate and adapt to climate change".

In addition to the direct effects of climate change through higher temperatures, there are other consequences, compounding the impact and leading to other environmental problems.

Besides the impact in Europe, CCCS scientists said that climate change was a contributory factor to an extreme heat wave affecting Central Asia in March, and affected rainfall in South America, leading to the deaths of 16 people in Argentina.

Last week, Australia's Bureau of Meteorology said that the country's hottest 12-month period on record had ended with its highest March temperature.

"I am sure everyone is now getting fatigued that these records keep falling," said Australian National University climate scientist Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick. "It's now incredibly predictable."