The winter of 2023-2024 was unusually sparse in snow, ice and cold, and scientists know the reason why: it was the hottest winter on record. Month-to-month temperatures have been getting broken so consistently over the past few months that the media has started referring to the 2023-2024 winter as the "lost winter." Indeed, a number of scientists suggested that this so-called "lost winter" may not be at all unusual in the future if humans do not address climate change.
In fact, hotter temperatures all year long can be expected, as indicated in an official statement by professor Adam Scaife, Head of Long Range Prediction at the Met Office, who said, “2024 is the first calendar year where there is a significant chance of breaching the 1.5° C level, but whether this happens will depend on the balance between the extra warmth from the current El Niño and whether we get a decrease later in 2024 from La Niña.”
The term "El Niño" refers to the weather phenomenon in which above-average sea-surface temperatures develop throughout the east-central equatorial Pacific; similarly, "La Niña" is the cyclical cooling of sea-surface temperatures in the east-central equatorial Pacific. The increased burning of fossil fuels, which is largely responsible for emitting the greenhouse gases causing global warming. This is the primary reason why, when 2023 ended, it was the hottest year in recorded history.
Continuing this trend, February 2024 was the hottest February ever recorded, raising red flags among scientists within its 29-day span. On average, February 2024 was 1.77º Celsius warmer than the average February before the Industrial Revolution, according to Copernicus, the European Union’s climate monitoring service. Similarly, January 2024 was the hottest January ever recorded.
"The El Niño was half-baked and yet it easily drove record global temperature."
The bad news is that Earth has officially passed the 1.5º Celsius threshold established as a target by the Paris climate accord to encourage greenhouse gas reductions. The good news is that, while humanity is on the path to surpassing the threshold of being warmer than 1.5º Celsius for several consecutive years, we have not officially done so yet.
Yet the close of February 2029 makes it clear that Earth's condition is still quite ominous, scientists who spoke to Salon all confirm. A recent study by Climate Central found that winter’s longest cold streaks have shrunk in 98% (236) of 240 U.S. locations studied since 1970. Overall the duration of cold streaks diminished by an average of six days across those locations since 1970. The trend is unmistakeable, and the implications are dire.
Just ask Dr. James Hansen, a professor of climatology at Columbia University, whose famous 1988 testimony before Congress helped raise awareness about the issue. He identified one statistic that is particularly concerning — ocean temperatures.
"The subsurface ocean temperature in the equatorial Pacific Ocean" is notable, Hansen wrote to Salon. He observed that the excess heat this year was much less than would normally be present prior to a Super El Niño, or an unusually strong El Niño. Yet this El Niño was hardly "super," despite the NOAA declaration; Hansen says they "simply looked at the [sea surface temperatures] in the Niño region, saw that it almost reached +2º C, and declared it 'Super.'" Much of that warming came from human-caused climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions. "The excess heat in the equatorial Pacific that is belched out during the El Niño was not super at all, yet we got record temperatures."
In short, "the El Niño was half-baked and yet it easily drove record global temperature."
Kevin E. Trenberth, a distinguished scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, wrote in The Conversation last June that "El Niños tend to peak in December, although their biggest atmospheric impacts may not be until February." Trenberth told Salon that "this was sort of expected. The El Niño was expected to peak in December in the tropical Pacific, as it did, but the global impacts peak in February. It will now decline and the event will be over by about May. After then the [sea surface temperatures] will likely be near then below 2023 and it is not a given that 2024 will beat 2023 as warmest year."
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"The first payment has come due for our Faustian Aerosol Bargain."
Other experts also expressed alarm at the fact that El Niño played a relatively minor role in causing this February's warming.
"El Niño has certainly provided an extra heating boost, but other parts of the planet outside of the usual El Niño influence, such as the Atlantic Ocean, have also been exceptionally warm during the past year," Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist and state climatologist at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, wrote to Salon. "It appears that last month will go down as Earth’s warmest February on record. February was also the 9th straight time that Earth set a new record high temperature for that month. The streak began last June."
Rebecca Benner, managing director for climate programs at The Nature Conservancy, told Salon that the ocean's unprecedented warming "has potential implications we don’t even understand yet. It will certainly have huge impacts on fish, including commercial fish, whales and corals among other ocean-dwelling species, but it will also have major implications for weather patterns including potentially causing more hurricanes."
Because humanity cannot accurately predict the full extent of how warm oceans will shift weather patterns, "we are in uncharted territory," she said.
Benner also drew attention to the fact that February's record-breaking temperatures were part of a larger trend. "Climate change is all about long-term trends," Benner pointed out. "We are living the trends. We are seeing consistently hotter temperatures over time. We know we cannot attribute any one extreme weather event to climate change, but we are starting to live patterns and trends that show climate change is a tangible reality."
Trenberth identified other signs of this trend beyond rising sea surface temperatures: The drought in the Amazon, the wildfires in Texas and carbon dioxide in Mauna Loa, which in Jan. 2024 was 422.8 parts per million. "But a year ago, Jan. 2023, it was 419.5, an increase of 3.3 ppm: as high as it has ever been," Trenberth said.
Global heating isn't just getting worse; the deterioration is accelerating. As Hansen summed it up, "the broader picture is that there is something else going on besides natural tropical variability on top of the steady global warming rate (0.18º C per decade) that occurred during 1970-2010."
"We have made the case, in our "Global Warming in the Pipeline" paper, that the 'something else' is that the first payment has come due for our Faustian Aerosol Bargain," Hansen said. "Aerosol cooling limited global warming by greenhouse gases, but aerosols kill 6-8 million people per year worldwide, so we are finally reducing aerosols, and that is the main cause of the acceleration of global warming."
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Dr. Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, concluded that people "should not be surprised" that February 2024 broke so many climate records.
"There’s now so much evidence pointing to the fact that our climate is warming, if you want to deny climate change, you might as well claim the earth is flat, too," Otto said. “Billions of measurements from weather stations, satellites, ships and planes point to the very basic fact that our planet is heating up at a dangerous pace."
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