Dear MEL Topic Readers,
Climate change: 'Uncharted territory' fears after record hot March
El Niño and La Niña are two phases of the Southern Oscillation cycle,
which interplay between the ocean and the atmosphere in the tropical Pacific
Ocean. They have significant impacts on weather patterns around the globe. During
El Niño, warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures develop in the central
and eastern Pacific Ocean. It tends to bring above-average rainfall in the
western Pacific and leads to warmer temperatures in many parts of the world. On
the contrary, during La Niña, average sea surface temperatures in the Pacific
Ocean are cooler than average. The last El Niño, which started last June and
peaked in December, seems to have added heat into the already warming global atmosphere.
As a result, March 2024 marked 1.68 degrees Celsius warmer temperature than “pre-industrial”
times, and it was the 10th consecutive month of high-temperature records.
Since the El Niño cycle had been there before we started burning massive fossil
fuels in the late 18th century, it was not the El Niño that raised
the temperature to an unprecedented level but the greenhouse gas emissions by
humans. It now seems unrealistic to count on the upcoming La Niña to cool the
global temperatures so much.
Read the article and see the graph to learn about how warmer the Earth
is becoming.
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