Winter heatwaves and hottest ocean ever

Recent heat waves in cities around the world bear the hallmark of global warming, researchers say. And last month was the warmest February on record.

Winter has been strangely warm for half the world's population, due in many places to burn fossil fuels, analysis shows. of temperature data from hundreds of locations around the world.

This is consistent with findings released Wednesday evening by the European Union's climate monitoring organization , Copernicus: The world as a whole experienced the hottest temperatures. Record February, making it the ninth consecutive month of record temperatures. Even more surprising, according to Copernicus, global ocean temperatures in February reached a record high for any time of year.

Taken together, the two These series of figures offer a portrait of an unequivocally warming world which, combined with the natural climatic phenomenon El Niño this year, has made winter unrecognizable in some regions.

The first analysis, conducted by Climate Central, an independent research group based in New Jersey, found that in several cities in North America, Europe and Asia, not only was the winter unusually warm, but that climate change played a clearly recognizable role.

Climate Central examined anomalies in December and January temperature data in 678 cities around the world and asked: what How important are climate change fingerprints for these unusual temperatures? In other words, its researchers tried to isolate the usual weather variability from the influence of climate change.

“There is temperature,” said Andrew Pershing, director of Climate Central. vice president for science, "and then there's our ability to really detect this climate signal in the data." 'article.

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