10th consecutive monthly heat record alarms and confounds climate scientists

For another month, another global heat record has left climate scientists scratching their heads and hoping this is an El Niño-related hangover rather than a symptom of worse-than-expected planetary health.

Global surface temperatures in March were 0.1 degree Celsius higher than the previous record for the month, set in 2016, and 1.68 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial average, according to data released April 9 by the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

This is the 10th consecutive monthly record in a warming phase that has shattered all previous records.

Over the past 12 months, average global temperatures have been 1.58 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

However the sharp increase in temperatures over the past year has surprised many scientists, and prompted concerns about a possible acceleration of heating.

Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, one of the vice-chairs of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), noted the planet has been warming at a pace of 0.3 degree Celsius per decade over the past 15 years, almost double the 0.18 degree Celsius per decade trend since the 1970s.

“Is this within the range of climate variability or signal of accelerated warming? My concern is that it might be too late if we just wait to see,” she tweeted.

Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, noted that temperature records are being broken each month by up to 0.2 degree Celsius.

Schmidt listed several plausible causes of the anomaly — the El Niño effect, reductions in cooling sulphur dioxide particles due to pollution controls, fallout from the January 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcanic eruption in Tonga, and the ramping up of solar activity in the run-up to a predicted solar maximum.

But based on preliminary analyses, he said these factors were not sufficient to account for the 0.2 degree Celsius increase: “If the anomaly does not stabilise by August — a reasonable expectation based on previous El Niño events — then the world will be in uncharted territory. It could imply that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated.”

The core of the problem — fossil fuel emissions — is well known and largely uncontested in the scientific community. A survey of nearly 90,000 climate-related studies shows a 99.9% consensus that humans are altering the climate by burning gas, oil, coal and trees.

“Stopping further warming requires rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions,” said Samantha Burgess, the deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Michael E Mann, the scientist whose 1999 “hockey-stick graph” showed the sharp rise in global temperatures since the industrial age, said the current trends were to be expected given the continuing rise in emissions.

But he said that should not be a source of comfort. “The world is warming AS FAST as we predicted — and that’s bad enough,” he tweeted.

Words to Learn 相关词汇

【异常 】 yìcháng anomaly a person or thing that is different from what is usual, or not in agreement with something else and therefore not satisfactory

【太阳活动峰年】 tàiyáng huódòng fēngnián solar maximum the peak of solar activity in the 11-year solar cycle

过去的一个月再次刷新了全球高温纪录。高温不退的现象让气候科学家感到迷惑不解，他们更希望这是厄尔尼诺事件的余波，而不是地球健康状况比预期更糟的征兆。

哥白尼气候变化服务局4月9日发布的数据显示，三月份全球地表温度比2016年创下的同月最高纪录高出0.1摄氏度，比工业化前平均水平高出1.68摄氏度。

这是全球地表温度连续第十个月打破纪录。在过去的12个月，气候持续变暖，全球平均温度比工业化前水平高出了1.58摄氏度。

联合国政府间气候变化专门委员会副主席戴安娜·尤尔格·沃萨茨指出，过去15年间，地球以每十年升高0.3摄氏度的速度在变暖，相比上世纪70年代之后每十年升高0.18摄氏度的变暖趋势几乎翻番。

美国宇航局戈达德空间研究所所长加文·施密特指出，每月地表温度水平最高比先前纪录超出了0.2摄氏度。施密特列举出了几个可能导致气候反常的原因：厄尔尼诺效应、对空气起到冷却作用的二氧化硫因污染防控而减少、2022年1月汤加火山喷发喷出的火山灰和温室气体、太阳活动高峰期到来前太阳活动的增加。

但是，施密特表示，基于初步分析发现，这些因素不足以导致0.2摄氏度的升温。他说：“如果异常升温现象到今年8月还在继续（8月前的升温还可看作是上一次厄尔尼诺事件的余波），这可能暗示着全球变暖已经从根本上改变了气候系统的运行方式，这一改变来得远比科学家预期的要早得多。”

全球变暖问题的核心——化石燃料排放——是众所周知的，而且在科学界也基本没有争议。一项对近9万项气候相关研究的调查显示，99.9%的研究一致认为人类燃烧天然气、石油、煤炭和木材的行为导致了气候变化。

曾在1999年绘制出全球气温自工业时代以来急剧上升的“曲棍球曲线图”的迈克尔·E·曼表示，鉴于温室气体排放量的持续上升，当前的趋势是可以被预见到的。但是他认为，这不能成为人类麻醉自己的理由。他在X网站上写道：“地球正以我们预测的速度在变暖，这已经够糟了。”(chinadaily.com)