It’s 60 Degrees in February. This Is What Climate Change Looks Like

Whether it’s winter or summer, it’s been difficult to avoid freakishly warm weather around the world this year. It might seem like a fluke, but it’s really a reflection of temperatures being driven inexorably higher by a changing climate.

This past January was the world’s seventh-warmest on record going back to 1850, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It was also the 47th straight January and the 527th straight month above the 20th century average.

In the Southern Hemisphere, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay are suffering through another brutal summer after breaking heat records last year. High temperatures, drought and La Niña winds have fueled runaway wildfires in Chile that have killed at least 26 people and destroyed hundreds of homes. Argentina is experiencing its eighth heat wave of the summer, according to the country’s National Meteorological Service. And Uruguay’s hydroelectric dams are at risk of running out of enough water to operate.

In the northern hemisphere, Europe’s New Year’s Day was the hottest ever, thanks to a heat wave one climatologist called “the most extreme event in European history.” And the US just ended its sixth-warmest January since at least 1895, with seven Northeastern states setting records.

At the poles, Arctic sea-ice extent was the third-lowest on record, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service. Worse, Antarctic sea-ice coverage retreated to a record low, due to a stunning temperature surge in the Antarctic Ocean. “Even as somebody who’s been looking at these changing systems for a few decades, I was taken aback by what I saw, by the degree of warming that I saw” in the Antarctic, University of Delaware oceanographer Carlos Moffat told Inside Climate News.

Even before that heat wave, Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier, aka the “Doomsday glacier,” was melting at the fastest rate in 5,000 years. The glacier is approaching a tipping point that could lead to its own collapse and that of the surrounding ice, triggering a disastrous sea-level rise.

Some places did have colder-than-usual Januarys — Siberia, Australia and the Middle East, to name a few. But then global temperatures are never uniform, and climate change can cause extremes in cold as well as heat. Temperatures can swing significantly in any region from year to year and day to day.

But the global trend is clearly higher:

Human-caused climate change has already warmed the planet by about 1.2C above its pre-industrial trend. Earth had heat waves long before people started burning fossil fuels, but climate change is making such events far more likely.

Limiting warming to 1.5C over the long haul to avoid the worst effects of climate change will require slashing carbon emissions in half by 2030. That in turn will demand far more aggressive commitments to transition away from fossil fuels than the world has managed so far. Otherwise, we can expect new extremes that will make January’s unusual weather seem ordinary in comparison.