January 2025 was the hottest first month of the year ever recorded. (Image: Getty)
Last month was the warmest January on record much to the surprise of experts who predicted it to be cooler than last year. Last month saw the record break by nearly 0.1C, the European Copernicus climate service says.
The cooler predictions may be accredited to the shift away from a natural weather pattern known as El Niño in the Pacific. Since 2023, there has been a string of temperature records with figures reaching 0.2C higher than expectations.
Scientists say they cannot pinpoint the specific reason for the extra warmth yet experts believe the world’s warming is due to emissions of gases from human activities, for example, the burning of fossil fuels.
Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Gavin Schmidt, told the : “The basic reason we’re having records being broken, and we’ve had this decades-long warming trend, is because we’re increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
Like other scientists, Mr Schmidt remains uncertain over this year in particular: “The specifics of exactly why 2023, and 2024, and [the start of] 2025, were so warm, there are other elements involved there. We’re trying to pin those down,” he adds.
Last month saw the record break by nearly 0.1C (Image: Getty)
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Last year, El Niño raised global temperatures due to unusually warm waters spreading across the Pacific, releasing extra heat into the atmosphere.
However, this year La Niña has been developing instead, which causes the opposite effect, according to the science group NOAA. Noaa.
Despite it being currently weak and taking a few months to have an effect over global temperatures, it led to scientists predicting a cooler January 2025.
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Emissions of gases from human activities are believed to have caused the gradual increase (Image: Getty)
If you’d asked me a few months ago what January 2025 would look like relative to January 2024, my best shot would have been it would be cooler,” said Adam Scaife, the head of monthly to decadal predictions at the UK .
“We now know it isn’t, and we don’t really know why that is.”
One theory as to why this is an extended response of the oceans to El Niño. The weather pattern may have prompted any accumulating heat to be released into the atmosphere, yet it remains unclear how this would still directly affect temperatures.
Professor Scaife says “that effect is likely to have waned by now” meaning “that explanation becomes less and less likely”.