Experts revealed their predictions a day after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that a new global heat record had been set in April for the 12th consecutive month.
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The hot streak is the longest since records began 137 years ago and scientists say the man-made carbon dioxide increase is contributing to these record temperatures.
Russian Federation and Alaska tallied the warmest above average temperatures while eastern Canada and southern South America experienced cooler-than-average temperatures last month, NOAA reported.
Practically every place on Earth was warmer than usual in April, making it the 12th consecutive month of record global temperatures.
However, while the data from both NOAA and NASA unequivocally suggest that April 2016 was the warmest April on record and, certainly, warmer than April 1998, other data suggests that this is not necessarily the case.
“The globally averaged temperature over land and ocean surfaces for April 2016 was the highest for the month of April in the NOAA global temperature dataset record, which dates back to 1880”, the agency said in a statement.
Warmer temperatures could mean arid conditions in crops, which in turn, could result in crop shortages and higher food prices.
On land, all six continents had at least a top nine warm April, with South America, Africa, and Asia observing a record-high average temperature for April, the NOAA report said.
The El Nino weather phenomenon, which tends to warm up equatorial waters in the Pacific, has boosted the long-term trend caused by increasing greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels.
Overall, 13 of 15 of these record spikes, or monthly temperature departures, have occurred since February 2015, signaling that global warming is accelerating. The most notable of them was in NE Canada, where the temperature was 9F lower than average.
The global land/ocean temperature departure for April was +1.10 deg.
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The new NOAA information reads like an almanac of climate calamity, and in many ways it’s a preview of what’s to come if climate projections prove correct.
