A new temperature record for the tenth month in a row

As the month came to a close, it looked more like summer than early spring in many Eastern European countries, for example in the Baltics, Poland, Croatia and Albania. In Japan, temperatures that normally occur in July were only measured, and it was also unusually warm in countries such as Guatemala and Costa Rica.

March was the warmest month ever recorded on Earth, with an average temperature of 14.14 degrees, according to the European Union's climate service Copernicus. It was 0.73 degrees warmer than average for the month during the 1991-2000 period and 0.10 degrees warmer than the previous record month in March 2016.

Highest average global temperatures

The average global temperature over the past 12 months is the highest ever recorded – it was 0.70 degrees warmer than the 1991-2020 average and 1.58 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial average.

The heat is caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases with the help of the natural weather phenomenon El Niño.

“Stopping further warming requires rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions,” Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus, says in a press release.

2023 was the warmest year yet SVT climate reporter Erika Bjerstrom tells us more about that in the clip below.

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