You Just Experienced The Warmest February Ever Measured on The Planet
February 2024 was the warmest February on record in the Copernicus ERA5 dataset. Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather announced this on Twitter/X. At 1,79 °C above preindustrial temperatures, it beat the 2016 record, measured -as this year- in an El Niño year.
If it feels like old news that a monthly climate record is broken, I understand the confusion since we have heard this every month since June last year. The El Niño event is partly to blame, but human-induced climate change is the structural contributing factor. You will likely hear this news a few more times in the next week when different institutions have analyzed their data.
Quite a few of these institutions will write about the temperature anomalies in central and (south)eastern Europe. Wiener Neustadt in Austria measured its warmest month of March in 1949; however, this year’s February temperatures broke that March record. This winter was the warmest since temperature measurements have been recorded for Austria. Last month, it was 7.5 °C warmer than average in southeast Poland.
