World records 529th straight month of above-average heat — and an El Niño is brewing

Planet Earth continues to run a fever. Data released by the Copernicus Climate Change Service last week showed that March of 2023 was the planet’s second-warmest month in recorded history, registering average global temperatures 0.92 degrees Fahrenheit above normal high temperatures measured between 1991 and 2020.

On Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed the March findings, adding that “Polar sea ice saw its second-smallest March coverage on record.”

Above-normal monthly temperatures haven’t just become the norm thanks to climate change; they are all but guaranteed. The heat in March marked the 529th consecutive month of hotter-than-normal temperatures in comparison to the 20th century average.

In a tweet last week, American environmentalist Bill McKibben put the findings in perspective:

In case you are wondering, the warmest March on record occurred in 2016, when an El Niño weather pattern helped shatter heat records around the world. In an El Niño, “trade winds weaken,” NOAA says on its website. As a result, ocean temperatures rise, resulting in warmer and drier temperatures in northern portions of the U.S. and Canada, and wetter-than-normal periods along the Gulf Coast and Southeastern U.S.

On Thursday, NOAA also issued an “El Niño Watch,” meaning that chances of the formation of that weather pattern appear more likely than not.

Other climate models used by meteorologists in the U.K., Japan, Australia and the U.S. have reached the same conclusion — that an El Niño could develop by August, potentially supercharging temperatures. While the oscillation from warmer El Niño patterns to cooler La Niña ones is a natural function of the Earth’s climate that is not the result of burning fossil fuels, climate scientists are quick to rebut those who suggest that the arrival of an El Niño is what has really accounted for global temperature rise.

“An El Nino typically gives global air temperature a bit of a boost by transferring heat from the ocean into the atmosphere (while La Nina does the opposite),” Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, wrote in a 2020 tweet regarding record high temperatures set during a La Niña period. “Last month, however, is now the warmest above average without that added boost. This is global warming, folks.”

In fact, the last eight years have been the warmest eight in recorded history, while only three of those featured an El Niño weather pattern.

“We’ve had La Niña the past few years, and guess what? We’ve had a ton of heat waves,” Andrew Kruczkiewicz, a senior researcher at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University, told the Washington Post.

While it remains to be seen whether the El Niño will form in the coming months and, if so, how hot it will make an already warming world, given the continuing streak of months with above-average temperatures, it is almost certain that the world’s fever won’t be breaking anytime soon.