Europe's climate monitor said Tuesday, April 9, that March was the hottest on record and the tenth straight month of historic heat, with sea surface temperatures also hitting a "shocking" new high. It is the latest red flag in a year already marked by climate extremes and rising greenhouse gas emissions, spurring fresh calls for more rapid action to limit global warming.

Every month since June 2023 has beaten its own "hottest ever" tag – and March 2024 was no exception. The EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said that March globally was 1.68°C hotter than an average March between the years 1850-1900, the reference period for the pre-industrial era.

The March record was only broken by 0.1°C but it is the broader trend that was more alarming, said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of C3S. Huge swathes of the planet endured above-average temperatures in March, from parts of Africa to Greenland, South America and Antarctica.

'Borrowed time'

It was not only the tenth consecutive month to break its own heat record, but capped the hottest 12-month period on the books – 1.58°C above pre-industrial averages. This doesn't mean the 1.5°C warming limit agreed by world leaders in Paris in 2015 has been breached – that is measured in decades, not individual years.

Nonetheless "the reality is that we're extraordinarily close, and already on borrowed time," Burgess told Agence France-Presse (AFP). The UN's IPCC climate panel has warned that the world will likely crash through 1.5°C in the early 2030s.

The story at sea was no less "shocking", Burgess said, with a new record for global ocean surface temperature set in February eclipsed once again in March. "That's incredibly unusual," she said.

Oceans cover 70% of the planet and have kept the Earth's surface liveable by absorbing 90% of the excess heat produced by carbon pollution from human activity since the dawn of the industrial age.