Washington – The world registered a new monthly heat record in January, despite the unusual cold in the United States, a phenomenon of the girl who is cooling and suggests forecasts that 2025 will be slightly less hot, according to the European climate service copernicus.
The surprising heat record of January coincides with a new study of a climate science expert, James Hansenformer NASA main scientist, and others, who argue that Global warming is accelerating. It is an affirmation that is dividing the research community.
At the global level, January 2025 was 0.09 degrees Celsius (0.16 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than January 2024, the most warm previous January, and was 1.75 ºC (3.15 ºF) warmer than before the industrial era, calculated Copernicus. It was the 18th month of the last 19 when the world reached or exceeded the internationally agreed heating limit of 1.5 ºC (2.7 ºF) above preindustrial times. Scientists will not consider that the limit has been exceeded unless and until global temperatures remain above 20 years.
Copernicus records date from 1940, but other American and British records date back to 1850. Scientists who use representative values such as trees’s rings say that this was the warmest in about 120,000 years or since the beginning of civilization human
As much, the greatest driver of record heat is the accumulation of greenhouse gases by burning coal, oil and natural gas, but natural contributions to temperature change have not acted as expected, said Samantha Burgess, leader Strategic for the climate of the European Meteorological Agency.
The great natural factor in global temperatures is usually the natural cycle of changes in the waters of the Equatorial Pacific Ocean. When the central Pacific is especially warm, this is the El Niño phenomenon and global temperatures tend to shoot. Last year the child was substantial, although it ended last June and the year was even warmer than expected, the warmer registered.
The cold reverse of El Niño, the girl, tends to mitigate the effects of global warming, making it much less likely that there are record temperatures. In January a girl began after brewing for months. Just last month, climatic scientists predicted that 2025 would not be as hot as 2024 or 2023, the girl being an important reason for it.
“Although the equatorial Pacific is not creating conditions that hot our global climate, we are still seeing record temperatures,” Burgess said, and added that much of it is due to record heat in the rest of the world’s oceans.
Usually, after a child like last year, temperatures fall quickly, but “we have not seen that,” Burges told The Associated Press.
For Americans, the news of a January with record heat might seem strange given how cold it was. But the United States is just a small fraction of the land surface, and “a much higher area of the planet’s surface was much warmer than the average,” Burgess observed.
January was unusually moderate in the Arctic. Parts of the Canadian Arctic had temperatures 30 ºC (54 ºF) warmer than the average, and the temperatures rose so much that the sea ice began to melt in some places, Burges said.
Copernicus said that this month the Arctic tied the January record of the slightest amount of sea ice. For the National Snow and Ice Center (NSIDC), located in the United States, it was the second lowest in its classification, behind 2018.
February has already started colder than last year, Burgess observed.
Do not rule out 2025 in the race for the hottest year, said Hansen, the former NASA scientist who has been called the godfather of climate science. Now he is at Columbia University. In a study in Environmental magazine: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, Hansen and his colleagues indicated that the last 15 years have heated approximately twice the rate of the previous 40 years.
“I am sure that this highest rate will continue for at least several years,” Hansen told The Associated Press in an interview. “Throughout the year it will be a fierce competition between 2024 and 2025.”
There has been a notable increase in temperature even when the variations of El Niño and climate change planned since 2020 are eliminated, Hansen added. He noticed the recent transport regulations that have resulted in a reduction in sulfur pollution, which reflects some sunlight away from the earth and in fact reduces heating. And that will continue, he said.
“The persistence of record heat through 2023, 2024 and now in the first month of 2025 it is shocking, to say the least,” said Jonathan Overpeck, the Environment Dean of the University of Michigan, who was not part of the study of Hansen. “There seems to be little doubt that global warming and climate change impacts are accelerating.”
But Gabe Vecchi de Princeton and Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania indicated that they disagree with Hansen on acceleration. Vecchi said there are not enough data to show that this is not a coincidence, while Mann said that temperature increases are still within what climatic models predict.