Flaming February!

The combination of human-mediated climate change and the El Nino phenomenon, is already resulting in 2024 having the hottest February, since weather recording started (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/17/february-on-course-to-break-unprecedented-number-of-heat-records). Monitoring stations as geographically diverse as Belize; Columbia; Indonesia; Japan; Kazakhstan; the Maldives; North Korea; Saudi Arabia; South Africa and Thailand have all recorded new highs. In deed, 140 countries have broken February heat records. This is three times more than any month, before 2023. It's not just that the records are broken, that's amazing experts. The increases seen also surpass anything that went before. It's also not just the land that's heating up. Ocean surface temperatures are also rocketing. The main Atlantic development region is where most powerful US hurricanes form. One hurricane expert notes that ocean temperatures there are "as warm today in mid-February as they typically are in middle July". The greater the increase in water temperature, the higher the probability of spawning a hurricane. It looks as if climate change has already elevated global temperatures to more than 2 degrees Centigrade above pre-Industrial levels. That was the upper value the 196 parties signed up to attempt to avoid in the 2015 Paris Accord. Naught out of ten, for progress?