EU climate Service: Average global surface temperature hit new record high in January
Feb. 6 (UPI) -- The European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service on Thursday said January 2025 was the hottest on record continuing warming trends despite the presence of cooling factors.
January bucked climate scientists' expectations with a record average surface temperature of 13.23 degrees Celsius and 1.75 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, well above the Paris Agreement target to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, data out Thursday from the EU's climate watchdog showed.
Scientists had been expecting a slightly cooler January as sea surface warming from the so-called "El Nino-Southern Oscillation" in the tropic regions of the Pacific waned in recent months and the cooler "El Nina" fluctuation took over.
The global surface air temperature average was 0.1 degrees Celsius warmer than in January 2024 and 0.79 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 average for the month of January.
That rise helped push the temperature for the year February 2024 through January 2025 to 0.73 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 average and 1.61 degrees Celsius above the average estimated temperature in the 1850-1900 pre-industrial era, the watchdog said.
The temperature for the 12 months through Jan. 31 was just 0.03 degrees Celsius below the record global average temperature anomaly of 0.76 degrees Celsius seen in the 12-month periods ending in June, July and August 2024.
The climate service did not say what the reasons for the rise might be but a NASA official told the BBC it was man-made.
"The basic reason we're having records being broken, and we've had this decades-long warming trend, is because we're increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
"The specifics of exactly why 2023, and 2024, and [the start of] 2025, were so warm, there are other elements involved there. We're trying to pin those down."
The all-important average sea surface temperature between the 60th north and south parallels was the second highest ever recorded at 20.78 degrees Celsius, 0.19 degrees below the January 2024 record.
SST patterns were marked by below-average temperatures in the central equatorial Pacific but close to or above average in the eastern equatorial Pacific, "suggesting a slowing or stalling of the move from El Nino towards La Nina conditions," the climate service said.
The January land surface temperature in Europe was 2.51 degrees Celsius higher than the 1991-2020 average for the month at 1.8 degrees Celsius, the second highest after the 2.64°C above-average record in January 2020, with southern and eastern Europe, including western Russia, seeing the mildest temperatures.
Iceland, the United Kingdom and Ireland, northern France, and northern Scandinavia/Finland saw much colder temperatures, pulling down the average for the continent.
The United States and Chukotka and Kamchatka in Russia's Far East saw the largest temperature anomaly with a much colder than average month along with the Arabian Peninsula and Southeast Asia where temperatures were well below the January average.
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