February 2024 was the hottest on record, with global temperatures surpassing critical climate threshold

The world has marked yet another consecutive month of record-breaking heat. New data from Copernicus, the European Union's climate change monitoring service, shows that last month was the hottest February on record globally, with "exceptionally high" temperatures in both the air and sea. 

The record heat comes as the U.S. continues to battle weather extremes. In recent weeks, communities across the nation have seen spring- and summer-like temperatures, extreme rain and flooding, massive snowfall, and fire weather conditions that drove Texas' largest-ever wildfire that quickly became one of the biggest in U.S. history. Those kinds of extremes are a byproduct of the climate change-fueled rise in global temperatures, and are only expected to become more frequent and intense as warming continues. 

According to Copernicus, the average global surface air temperature in February was 13.54 degrees Celsius (roughly 56.4 degrees Fahrenheit). That is 1.77 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average for February, leading it to become the ninth consecutive month where each month was the warmest on record globally. That comes after 2023 broke the record for the warmest year.