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Since June 2023, every month has set new heat records. April 2024 continued this trend, with temperatures 1.58°C above pre-industrial levels, indicating ongoing global warming, report Copernicus.
April brought “remarkable” temperatures with new monthly heat records across land and ocean surfaces, even as a weakening El Niño suggests a possible cooling later this year, according to the latest Copernicus report.
“April 2024 was warmer globally than any previous April in the data record, with … surface air temperature of 15.03°C, 0.67°C above the 1991-2020 average for April and 0.14°C above the previous high set in April 2016. This is the eleventh month in a row that is the warmest,” according to a May 8 report by Copernicus Climate Change Service, the European Union’s climate agency.
Since June 2023, every month has set its own monthly heat record. April 2024 was no exception, with an average temperature of 15.03°C, which is 1.58°C above the normal April temperature in the pre-industrial climate era (1850-1900). “While unusual, a similar streak of monthly global temperature records happened previously in 2015/2016,” notes Copernicus.
Over the past 12 months, the global temperature has averaged 1.61°C higher than in the pre-industrial era, exceeding the 1.5°C limit set by the 2015 Paris Agreement. However, this anomaly should be viewed over several decades to determine if this critical threshold has been met.
These figures highlight “how remarkable the global temperature conditions we are currently experiencing are,” said Julien Nicolas, a climatologist at Copernicus’s climate change service.
“Each additional degree of global warming is accompanied by extreme weather events, which are both more intense and more likely,” Nicolas said. The recent weeks have seen severe heatwaves in Asia, from India to Vietnam, while southern Brazil has been suffering from deadly floods. Heavy rain also resulted in flooding parts of North America, Central Asia and the Persian Gulf, with the United Arab Emirates having its largest rainfall in 75 years, and a year’s amount of rain in Dubai alone. However, drought prevailed in northern Mexico, around the Caspian Sea, and across much of Australia.
Ocean surface temperatures also set a new monthly record in April, averaging 21.04°C in non-polar regions, marking a 13th consecutive monthly record. This overheating threatens marine life, increases moisture in the atmosphere, and endangers the oceans’ crucial role in absorbing human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. However, temperatures in April showed a slight dip compared to March and its all-time high (21.07°C).
The natural climate phenomenon El Niño “continued to weaken” in April, moving toward “neutral conditions,” Copernicus estimates. This variation affects the equatorial zone of the Pacific Ocean and leads to global warming.
El Niño “peaked earlier this year,” noted Nicolas, which might explain the slight decrease in average temperatures in April compared to March. “Model projections indicate a possible transition to La Niña conditions in the second half of the year, but the situation remains quite uncertain,” the climatologist said.
The El Niño meteorological phenomenon affects weather worldwide. Triggered by abnormally high temperatures on the surface of the Pacific Ocean, it is characterized by significant evaporation that later falls as rain. The opposite phenomenon, La Niña, occurs when the Pacific surface temperature cools.
However, the end of El Niño will not alter the long-term warming trend. “This phenomenon overlays long-term trends that continue and are directly linked to warming caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the amounts of heat that are absorbed and stored, particularly in the oceans,” Nicolas pointed out.
Also, these trends will continue “to push global temperatures towards new records,” Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement. In late March, the UN had already warned that there was a “high probability” that 2024 would again record unprecedented temperatures, as 2023 concludes a decade of record heat, pushing the planet “to the brink.”
For Nicolas, it is “still a bit early” to predict whether new records will be set, given that 2023 was exceptional.