MUZAFFARABAD (Kashmir English): The world experienced its second-warmest May this year, a month when climate change helped cause a record heatwave in Greenland, scientists announced on Wednesday.
Last month was the Earth’s second-warmest May on record, with only May 2024 being warmer.
This meant the northern hemisphere had its second-hottest March to May spring ever, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) in their monthly report.
Global surface temperatures last month were, on average, 1.4 degrees Celsius higher than in the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period, which is when humans started burning fossil fuels on a large scale.
This broke a period of unusual heat, where 21 of the last 22 months had an average global temperature of more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. However, scientists have warned that this slight break from extreme heat is unlikely to last.
Carlo Buontempo, the director of C3S, said that while this might offer a short break for the planet, they expect the 1.5°C threshold to be passed again soon because the climate system continues to warm.
The main reason for climate change is the greenhouse gases released from burning fossil fuels. Last year was the hottest on record for the planet.
Sarah Kew, a co-author of the study and a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, stated that even countries with cold climates are experiencing unusually high temperatures.
The global limit of 1.5°C is the warming level that countries agreed to try and prevent under the Paris climate agreement, to avoid the worst effects of warming.
The world has not yet officially gone beyond this target, which refers to an average global temperature of 1.5°C over many decades.
A separate study, published by the World Weather Attribution group of climate scientists on Wednesday, found that human-caused climate change made a record-breaking heatwave in Iceland and Greenland last month about 3°C hotter than it would have been otherwise.
This contributed to a significant extra melting of Greenland’s ice sheet.
However, some scientists have said it can no longer realistically be met and have urged governments to reduce carbon dioxide emissions more quickly to limit how much the temperature goes over this target and to reduce extreme weather. C3S’s records go back to 1940 and are checked against global temperature records from 1850.
