With daffodils flowering early, snow melting in ski resorts and even sunbathing in the northern hemisphere, you may have already guessed it.
But it’s now official – last month was the warmest February on record, the EU’s climate change programme has revealed.
The global average temperature for the month was 56.3°F (13.54°C), which is 0.21°F (0.12°C) above the temperature of the previous warmest February, in 2016.
Worryingly, this is also 1.45°F (0.81°C) warmer than the 1991-2020 global average for February – and the experts point to greenhouse gas emissions as the cause.
EU scientists have already revealed that last year was the hottest year on record, while July 2023 was the hottest month on record.
February 2024 was the warmest February on record globally, with an average surface air temperature of 56.3°F (13.54°C)
Men bathe in the 14°C sea during a warm weekend, with the Sanguinaires islands in the background, on the French Mediterranean island of Corsica, in Porticcio, February 18, 2024
‘February joins the long streak of records of the last few months,’ said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).
‘As remarkable as this might appear, it is not really surprising as the continuous warming of the climate system inevitably leads to new temperature extremes.
‘The climate responds to the actual concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere so, unless we manage to stabilise those, we will inevitably face new global temperature records and their consequences.’
C3S, managed by the European Commission, looks at temperature readings based on a variety of platforms and instruments, from weather stations to weather balloons and satellites.
The department’s readings refer to the average air temperature for the whole planet over the whole year – so lower than a single typically ‘hot’ temperature reading.
According to C3S, February 2024 is the ninth month in a row that was the warmest on record for that respective month.
It was 3.18°F (1.77°C) warmer than an estimate of the February average for 1850-1900, the ‘pre-industrial’ reference period.
Graph plots daily global average surface air temperature anomalies (°C) relative to estimated values for 1850-1900 for 2024 (in white) and 2023 (red)
Daffodils bloom in St James’s Park with the London Eye in the background, London, February 23, 2024
Pictured, a snowless ski slope at the Artouste ski resort at Laruns, in the Pyrenees Atlantiques, south-western France, February 19, 2024
A ski resort in Orlicke Zahori in the Orlicke Mountains, Czech Republic, struggles with a lack of snow, February 10 2024
The daily global average temperature was ‘exceptionally high’ during the first half of the month, reaching 3.6°F (2°C) above the 1850-1900 levels on four consecutive days (8 to 11 February).
This is a worry because a global aim is to keep the average global temperature within 3.6°F (2°C) and if possible 2.7°F (1.5°C) as part of the Paris Agreement, a binding climate treaty signed in 2016.
Fortunately, the news doesn’t mean we’ve surpassed the limits set by the Paris Agreement (as they refer to periods of at least 20 years where this average temperature anomaly is exceeded).
Looking at Europe separately from the rest of the world, temperatures last month were 5.94°F (3.3°C) above the 1991-2020 average for February.
Much of the above average temperatures were experienced in central and eastern Europe, but they were above average over northern Siberia, central and northwest North America, the majority of South America, across Africa and in western Australia.
CS3’s main metric for measuring how hot it is, is the temperature of the air, but it also keeps track of temperatures of the world’s oceans.
Namely it looks at sea surface temperature – how hot the water is close to the ocean’s surface.
CS3 said the average global sea surface temperature for February 2024 was 37.91°F (21.06°C), the highest for any month in the dataset and above the previous record of August 2023 (69.76°F/20.98°C).
People sit on the bank of the Seine river to enjoy the warm weather in front of the Pont des Arts in Paris on February 15, 2024
A jogger runs along the downtown Riverwalk during an unusually warm winter day on February 27, 2024 in Chicago, Illinois
Skiers use a lift on a partially snow-covered ski slope in the Alpine resort of Les Mosses, in Ormont-Dessous, Switzerland, February 6, 2024. Mild weather in recent days in the Swiss Alps disrupted the activity of alpine ski resorts
Pictured, sea surface temperature for February 2024. This is a separate metric for measuring how hot the world is
Going forward, it’s possible an upcoming month in 2024 could replace July 2023 as the hottest month on record.
The global average temperature for July 2023 was 62.51°F (16.95°C), the highest since records began in 1940 and well above the previous record of 61.93°F (16.63°C) set in July 2019.
Meanwhile, 2023 overall set the record for warmest ever year largely due to ‘unprecedented’ global temperatures from June onwards, fueled mainly by greenhouse gases.
Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane (the two most important greenhouse gases) continued to increase and reached record levels in 2023.
2023 is confirmed as the warmest calendar year in global temperature data records going back to 1850. The global average air temperature was 58.96°F (14.98°C), around 0.3°F (0.17°C) higher than the result in 2016
In 2023, two days in November (17 and 18) were, for the first time, more than 3.6°F (2°C) warmer than the ‘pre-industrial’ average
What’s more, each month from June to December in 2023 was warmer than the corresponding month in any previous year.
Several months of 2023 were the hottest on record for that particular month, such as September, November and December, as well as July (not only the hottest July ever but the hottest month ever).
‘2023 was an exceptional year with climate records tumbling like dominoes,’ said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of C3S.
‘Temperatures during 2023 likely exceed those of any period in at least the last 100,000 years.’
