The European climate monitor reported that last month was the warmest January on record, with temperatures 1.75°C above pre-industrial levels, extending a trend of record-breaking heat throughout 2023 and 2024. Climate scientists are debating additional factors that could be driving the persistent and unprecedented global warming.
Scientists were expecting an “improvement,” at least a stabilization, but that was not the case. January 2025 was the hottest January ever recorded worldwide, according to the European Copernicus Climate Change Service, mainly due to man-made global warming.
“January 2025 is another astonishing month, continuing with the record temperatures observed over the past two years, despite the development of La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific and its temporary cooling effect on global temperatures,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), in their monthly bulletin released on Thursday, February 6.
With an average temperature of 13.23°C, according to Copernicus, “January 2025 exceeded pre-industrial levels by 1.75°C”, before humans profoundly altered the climate through massive use of coal, oil, and fossil gas.
Scientists were hoping that the series of records set in 2023 and 2024, the two warmest years ever recorded, would be interrupted with the end of the El Niño natural warming phenomenon and the arrival of its opposite, La Niña.
“This is a bit surprising… we are not seeing this cooling effect, or at least a temporary brake, on global temperature that we expected to see,” said Julien Nicolas, a climatologist at Copernicus.
Copernicus even observes signs of “a slowdown or a halt in the evolution towards La Niña conditions“, which could completely disappear in March, according to the climatologist.
An unusually warm winter in the Arctic
Global temperatures, whose rise has led to droughts, heatwaves, or devastating floods, depend largely on those of the seas.
The surface temperatures of the oceans, the main climate regulators covering more than 70% of the planet, remain at levels never seen before April 2023.
For the ocean surface, January 2025 is the second warmest month behind the absolute heat record of January 2024.
In the Arctic, where winter is unusually warm, sea ice reached its lowest extent in January, almost equal to that of 2018, according to Copernicus. A U.S. analysis this week placed it as the second lowest level in that dataset.
With this temperature record, January 2025 becomes “the eighteenth of the last nineteen months in which the average air temperature at the globe’s surface has exceeded pre-industrial levels by more than 1.5°C,” notes the European observatory.
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