It’s not always easy to understand the current climate crisis with simple, straightforward facts – there aren’t too many variables involved – but here’s an alarming statistic for you: every month of the last 12 months has set a new global temperature record. . moon.

NASA confirmed that new peaks in average global temperatures were seen in May 2024, following April, March, February and January. Before that, from June to December 2023, the situation was exactly the same. Such a line has never been seen before as long as records have been kept, and it points to the rapid warming our planet is currently experiencing. What’s even more sobering is that even worse things lie ahead.

“It is clear that we are facing a climate crisis,” says NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “Communities across America—Arizona, California, Nevada—and communities around the world are directly facing extreme temperatures in unprecedented numbers.”

Records are being broken everywhere, but there is no need to celebrate. Last November, the global average temperature was 2°C above pre-industrial levels for the first time, and the United States experienced its warmest winter in history.

Despite evidence that our planet’s climate is changing significantly, humanity is emitting more greenhouse gases than at any time in history. We are hurtling towards the edge of the climate cliff and show no signs of slowing down. There is no doubt that this is also a trend. According to NASA, the last 10 years have been the warmest since we started keeping records in the late 19th century. Before this new annual streak, the hottest streak was in 2015-2016 and lasted seven months.

“We’re having hotter days, hotter months, hotter years,” said Keith Calvin, NASA’s chief scientist and senior climate advisor. “We know that this increase in temperature is caused by our greenhouse gas emissions and is affecting people and ecosystems around the world.”

Strong El Niño weather that began in early 2023 likely caused some of these high temperatures, and as the weather subsides, there are signs that record temperatures could be seen every month, at least for now.

Tens of thousands of weather stations and instruments on land, ships and buoys around the world are used to obtain measurements published by NASA. The figures are then processed to account for the distance between readings as well as other potential factors such as urban heat islands.

If there’s anything positive here, it’s that we’re getting better at tracking the global climate picture, making sense of the data, and predicting what might happen next. Now all we have to do is do something about it.

“We provide critical climate data to improve lives and livelihoods and benefit all humanity,” says Nelson.