Warmest April on record as 2020 set to be hottest year

As COVID-19 paralyses the world, the climate crisis quietly gets worse. April was the second warmest on record and 2020 is predicted to be the hottest year ever. But worse dangers also lie in wait.

While the world has been paralysed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the growing climate crisis has been quietly rolling along in the background, almost unnoticed.

We ignore it at our peril.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s April Global State of the Climate Report released this month found global land and ocean temperatures were 1.06 degrees Celsius above the 20th-century average.

This was the second highest April temperature in the 141-year record. Only April 2016 was warmer at +1.13 degrees.

And it spells worrying news for the planet.

“The year 2020 is almost certain to rank among the five warmest years on record,” NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) said.

If it does, the last seven years will be the seven warmest on record.

The prediction comes as NOAA announced that the period from January to March 2020 was the second-warmest in its 141 years of record keeping.

April 2020 also marked the 424th consecutive month with temperatures above the 20th-century average. The eight warmest Aprils have all occurred since 2010.

The most notable warm April temperature departures were observed across much of northern Asia where temperatures were 4-degrees celsius above average or higher. Other notable warm areas include western Australia, central Europe, the Gulf of Mexico, the Labrador and Bering seas, and across parts of the northern and southern Pacific Ocean and Antarctica, where temperature departures were at least +2C.

The NOAA observed that Australia had its fifth hottest April on record, with Queensland, WA and NT all having an April temperature among the six warmest on record.

Elsewhere, things were more extreme. Hawaii had its hottest April ever, as did the Caribbean.

The NOAA report follows another study which found that in just 50 years, 2 billion to 3.5 billion people, mostly the poor who can’t afford air conditioning, will be living in a climate that historically has been too hot to handle.

With every 1 degree celsius increase in global average annual temperature from man-made climate change, about a billion or so people will end up in areas too warm day-in, day-out to be habitable without cooling technology, according to ecologist Marten Scheffer of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, co-author of the study.

How many people will end up at risk depends on how much heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions are reduced and how fast the world population grows.

Under the worst-case scenarios for population growth and for carbon pollution - which many climate scientists say is looking less likely these days - the study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences predicts about 3.5 billion people will live in extremely hot areas. That’s a third of the projected 2070 population.

But even scenarios considered more likely and less severe project that in 50 years a couple of billion people will be living in places too hot without air conditioning, the study said.

“It’s a huge amount and it’s a short-time. This is why we’re worried,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who wasn’t part of the study. She and other outside scientists said the new study makes sense and conveys the urgency of the man-made climate change differently than past research.

Within 50 years, warming could force more than a billion people to migrate because their homelands will be too hot to occupy, according to the study.

In an unusual way to look at climate change, a team of international scientists studied humans like they do bears, birds and bees to find the “climate niche” where people and civilisations flourish. They looked back 6000 years to come up with a sweet spot of temperatures for humanity: Average annual temperatures between 11 to 15 degrees Celsius.

We can - and do - live in warmer and colder places than that, but the farther from the sweet spot, the harder it gets.

The scientists looked at places projected to get uncomfortably and considerably hotter than the sweet spot and calculated at least 2 billion people will be living in those conditions by 2070.

Currently about 20 million people live in places with an annual average temperature greater than 29C - far beyond the temperature sweet spot. That area is less than 1 per cent of the Earth’s land, and it is mostly near the Sahara Desert and includes Mecca, Saudi Arabia. But as the world gets more crowded and warmer, the study concluded large swathes of Africa, Asia, South America and Australia will likely be in this same temperature range. Well over 1 billion people, and up to 3.5 billion people, will be affected depending on the climate altering choices humanity makes over the next half century, according to lead author Chi Xu of Nanjing University in China.

With enough money, “you can actually live on the moon,” Scheffer said. But these projections are “unlivable for the ordinary, for poor people, for the average world citizen.” Places like impoverished Nigeria - with a population expected to triple by the end of he century - would be less able to cope, said study co-author Tim Lenton, a climate scientist and director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter in England.

Additional reporting: Seth Bornstein, AP