Copernicus’ preliminary data shows that the global average temperature Sunday was 17.09 degrees Celsius (62.76 degrees Fahrenheit), beating the record set just last year on July 6, 2023 by .01 degrees Celsius (.02 degrees Fahrenheit). Both Sunday’s mark and last year’s record obliterate the previous record of 16.8 degrees Celsius (62.24 degrees Fahrenheit), which itself was only a few years old, set in 2016.

Without human-caused climate change, records would be broken nowhere near as frequently, and new cold records would be set as often as hot ones.

“What is truly staggering is how large the difference is between the temperature of the last 13 months and the previous temperature records,” Copernius Director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement. “We are now in truly uncharted territory and as the climate keeps warming, we are bound to see new records being broken in future months and years.”

While 2024 has been extremely warm, what kicked Sunday into new territory was a way toastier than usual Antarctic winter, according to Copernicus. The same thing was happening on the southern continent last year when the record was set in early July.

But it wasn’t just a warmer Antarctica on Sunday. Interior California baked with triple digit heat Fahrenheit, complicating more than two dozen fires in the U.S. West. At the same time, Europe sweltered through its own deadly heat wave.

“It’s certainly a worrying sign coming on the heels of 13 straight record -setting months,” said Berkeley Earth climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, who now estimates there’s a 92% chance that 2024 will beat 2023 as the warmest year on record.

July is generally the hottest month of the year globally, mostly because there is more land in the Northern hemisphere, so seasonal patterns there drive global temperatures.

Copernicus records go back to 1940, but other global measurements by the United States and United Kingdom governments go back even further, to 1880. Many scientists, taking those into consideration along with tree rings and ice cores, say last year’s record highs were the hottest the planet has been in about 120,000 years. Now the first six months of 2024 have broken even those.

Scientists blame the supercharged heat mostly on climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas and on livestock agriculture. Other factors include a natural El Nino warming of the central Pacific Ocean, which has since ended. Reduced marine fuel pollution and possibly an undersea volcanic eruption are also causing some additional warmth, but those aren’t as important as greenhouse gases trapping heat, they said.

Because El Nino is likely to be soon replaced by a cooling La Nina, Hausfather said he would be surprised if 2024 sees any more monthly records, but the hot start of the year is still probably enough to make it warmer than last year.

Sure Sunday’s mark is notable but “what really kind of makes your eyeballs jump out” is how the last few years have been so much hotter than previous marks, said Northern Illinois University climate scientist Victor Gensini, who wasn’t part of the Copernicus team. “It’s certainly a fingerprint of climate change.”

University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann said the difference between the this year’s and last year’s high mark is so tiny and so preliminary that he is surprised the European climate agency is promoting it.

“We should really never be comparing absolute temperatures for individual days,” Mann said in an email.

Yes, it’s a small difference, Gensini said in an interview, but there have been more than 30,500 days since Copernicus data started in 1940, and this is the hottest of all of them.

“What matters is this,” said Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler. “The warming will continue as long as we’re dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and we have the technology to largely stop doing that today. What we lack is political will.”

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Floyd County keeps flooding and the federal government keeps coming to the rescue.

In July 2022, at least 40 people died and 300 homes were damaged in flooding across eastern Kentucky. It was the 13th time in 12 years that Floyd County was declared a federal disaster. These are disasters so costly that local governments feel they can’t pay for it all, so the governor asks the president to declare a disaster freeing up federal funds.

“After that flood I had 500 homeless people looking at me, ‘Judge what are we going to do’?” recalled Judge Robbie Williams, administrator for the county of a bit more than 35,000 people. “It’s overwhelming and it’s just a matter of time before it happens again.”

It did. In 2023, Floyd County was declared a disaster again for the 14th time, starting in 2011. And Floyd County isn’t even the nation’s most disaster-prone county. Neighboring Johnson County has 15 disasters declared by the Federal Emergency Management Agency since 2011.

When it comes to extreme weather and other so-called natural disasters, people generally look to the hurricane or earthquake-prone coasts and say that’s where the danger is. But that’s not where the highest concentration of federally declared disasters are, according to an atlas of 713 FEMA declared disasters created by Rebuild by Design and New York University. While most people in disasters think about federal government direct financial help to individual victims to pay for lost housing and businesses, the atlas focuses on the $60 billion pot of FEMA aid to governments.

Eight of the nine counties with the most federal declared disasters since 2011 — more than a dozen each — are in Kentucky, with the one in Vermont. These counties have four to five times the number of disaster as the national average of three in the past 13 years.

“California and Louisiana and I would say now even Texas, Florida, for sure, they soak up all the oxygen when you hear about these giant storms,” said atlas creator Amy Chester, director of the disaster prevention-focused Rebuild By Design nonprofit group. “But what you’re not hearing about are these storms that are happening all the time, and that’s just becoming like, regular to places like Vermont.” Chester also mentioned Tennessee, Oklahoma, Missisippi, Iowa and Alaska as hotspots.

“We want to show that climate change is already here,” Chester said of the data covers 2011 to 2023, but doesn’t include heat waves, drought or COVID. “Communities are suffering all over.”

Before she crunched the data, Chester said she figured Vermont would be a haven from climate change. Cooler. Inland. Instead it’s a disaster hot spot.

“It’s awful” Chester said. “It just keeps happening to them.”

Days after she said that Vermont flooded again, this time from the remnants of Hurricane Beryl.

Flooding is the most common disaster in the United States, according to FEMA. Since 2011, FEMA handed out more than $41 billion in aid following hurricanes, the most of any disaster type.

“What the data tell us is that the frequency and severity of disasters at local-state scales is increasing with rural, suburban, and urban places being affected nationwide,” Susan Cutter, co-director of the Hazards Vulnerability and Resilience Institute at the University of South Carolina, said in an email. She wasn’t part of Chester’s research. “More needs to be done to enhance resilience to reduce their impacts on people.”

The largest county in the nation that has not had a federally declared disaster since 2011 is Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, where the city of Charlotte is.

“We’ve been blessed,” said Charlotte emergency management chief Robert Graham, who attributes the lack of federal disasters to good luck, good government and good geography.

“We are protected from the coast somewhat,” Graham said of the inland county. “We don’t get all the impacts from the mountains. Charlotte seems to be in a, somewhat of a sweet spot.”

Graham said a cushy reserve fund and planning have prevented the city from having to go to the federal government for financial help after disasters like a 2019 flood. But he said he knows it’s only a matter of time before the city’s luck runs out.

Luck long abandoned eastern Kentucky.

In Floyd County, geography and government regulations make it tough, Williams said. The mountain-heavy county has people living in the narrow valley floor in old coal camps, he said. And when it rains, the ever-shallower creeks overflows.

“We’re seeing historic levels of flooding,” Williams said. “It’s only getting worse.”

Environmental regulations won’t let local officials dredge the creeks, which keep getting built up with silt coming down the mountains, often from development, Williams said. Some creeks decades ago were 20 feet deep but are now shallow enough to walk across, he said.

The problem is there is nowhere for the rain to go,” Williams said.

National Weather Service data shows that Floyd County now averages more than 50 inches of rain a year, up from 42 to 43 inches a year in the mid 1980s. Warmer air holds more moisture, with studies and statistics showing the Eastern United States is not only getting more rain, but more intense downpours that cause floods.

Floyd County’s government received more than $35 million in FEMA disaster aid since 2011. That’s not even near the top, where the big money went to places devastated by hurricanes.

Five counties — three of them in New York — received more than $1 billion in FEMA aid, led by Manhattan’s New York County, which got $8.9 billion, nearly all of it due to 2012’s Hurricane Sandy. All of the top five counties were struck by one or more hurricanes.

Chester’s group decided to look at congressional districts and how they compared in disasters, especially with a nearly evenly split House of Representatives.

Nearly 60 counties have had at least 10 federally declared disasters since 2011 and nearly 70% of them are represented in Congress by Republicans. About 280 counties have had no disasters in that time periods and 87% of them are represented by Democrats, according to the NYU data.

Chester noted that Republicans aren’t talking about climate change on the campaign trail, but said “research shows that extreme weather is not a partisan issue.”

More important is how state and local policies create or minimize risk for future disasters, said Samantha Montano, a professor of emergency management at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. And in Floyd County the government using FEMA money is buying the homes of 150 residents to move them out of harm’s way, but some don’t want to leave, Williams said.

“Until we get those homes out of these flood ways… we’re still going to have these issues,” Williams said.

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Data journalist Mary Katherine Wildeman contributed from Hartford, Connecticut.

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Hurricane Beryl’s explosive growth into an unprecedented early whopper of a storm shows the literal hot water the Atlantic and Caribbean are in right now and the kind of season ahead, experts said.

Beryl smashed multiple records even before its major-hurricane-level winds approached land. The powerful storm is acting more like monsters that form in the peak of hurricane season thanks mostly to water temperatures as hot or hotter than the region normally gets in September, five hurricane experts told The Associated Press.

Beryl set the record for earliest Category 4 with winds of at least 130 mph (209 kilometers per hour) — the first-ever Category 4 in June. It also was the earliest storm to rapidly intensify with wind speeds jumping 63 mph (102 kph) in 24 hours, going from an unnamed depression to a Category 4 in 48 hours.

Late Monday, it strengthened to a Category 5, becoming the earliest hurricane of that strength observed in the Atlantic basin on record, and only the second Category 5 hurricane in July after Hurricane Emily in 2005, the National Hurricane Center said. Category 5 storms have winds exceeding 157 mph (250 kph).

Beryl is on an unusually southern path, especially for a major hurricane, said University at Albany atmospheric scientist Kristen Corbosiero.

It made landfall Monday on the island of Carriacou with winds of up to 150 mph (240 kph), and is expected to plow through the islands of the southeast Caribbean. Beryl may stay near its current strength for another day before it begins weakening significantly, according to the late Monday forecast.

“Beryl is unprecedentedly strange,” said Weather Underground co-founder Jeff Masters, a former government hurricane meteorologist who flew into storms. “It is so far outside the climatology that you look at it and you say, ‘How did this happen in June?’”

Get used to it. Forecasters predicted months ago it was going to be a nasty year and now they are comparing it to record busy 1933 and deadly 2005 — the year of Katrina, Rita, Wilma and Dennis.

“This is the type of storm that we expect this year, these outlier things that happen when and where they shouldn’t,” University of Miami tropical weather researcher Brian McNoldy said. “Not only for things to form and intensify and reach higher intensities, but increase the likelihood of rapid intensification. All of that is just coming together right now, and this won’t be the last time.”

Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach called Beryl “a harbinger potentially of more interesting stuff coming down the pike. Not that Beryl isn’t interesting in and of itself, but even more potential threats and more — and not just a one off — maybe several of these kinds of storms coming down later.”

The water temperature around Beryl is about 2 to 3.6 degrees (1 to 2 degrees Celsius) above normal at 84 degrees (29 Celsius), which “is great if you are a hurricane,” Klotzbach said.

Warm water acts as fuel for the thunderstorms and clouds that form hurricanes. The warmer the water and thus the air at the bottom of the storm, the better the chance it will rise higher in the atmosphere and create deeper thunderstorms, said the University at Albany’s Corbosiero.

Sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic and Caribbean “are above what the average September (peak season) temperature should be looking at the last 30-year average,” Masters said.

It’s not just hot water at the surface that matters. The ocean heat content — which measures deeper water that storms need to keep powering up — is way beyond record levels for this time of year and at what the September peak should be, McNoldy said.

“So when you get all that heat energy you can expect some fireworks,” Masters said.

This year, there’s also a significant difference between water temperature and upper air temperature throughout the tropics.

The greater that difference is, the more likely it becomes that storms will form and get bigger, said MIT hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel. “The Atlantic relative to the rest of the tropics is as warm as I’ve seen,” he said.

Atlantic waters have been unusually hot since March 2023 and record warm since April 2023. Klotzbach said a high pressure system that normally sets up cooling trade winds collapsed then and hasn’t returned.

Corbosiero said scientists are debating what exactly climate change does to hurricanes, but have come to an agreement that it makes them more prone to rapidly intensifying, as Beryl did, and increases the strongest storms, like Beryl.

Emanuel said the slowing of Atlantic ocean currents, likely caused by climate change, may also be a factor in the warm water.

A brewing La Nina, which is a slight cooling of the Pacific that changes weather worldwide, also may be a factor. Experts say La Nina tends to depress high altitude crosswinds that decapitate hurricanes.

La Nina also usually means more hurricanes in the Atlantic and fewer in the Pacific. The Eastern Pacific had zero storms in May and June, something that’s only happened twice before, Klotzbach said.

Globally, this may be a below average year for tropical cyclones, except in the Atlantic.

On Sunday night, Beryl went through eyewall replacement, which usually weakens a storm as it forms a new center, Corbosiero said. But now the storm has regained its strength.

“This is sort of our worst scenario,” she said. “We’re starting early, some very severe storms. .. Unfortunately, it seems like it’s playing out the way we anticipated.”

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Seth Borenstein has been covering hurricanes for nearly 35 years and is on X at @borenbears

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The strong El Nino weather condition that added a bit of extra heat to already record warm global temperatures is gone. It’s cool flip side, La Nina, is likely to breeze in just in time for peak Atlantic hurricane season, federal meteorologists said.

The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration Thursday pronounced dead the El Nino that warms parts of the central Pacific. The El Nino, while not quite a record breaker in strength, formed a year ago has been blamed, along with human-caused climate change and overall ocean warmth, for a wild 12 months of heat waves and extreme weather.

The world is now in a neutral condition when it comes to the important natural El Nino Southern Oscillation, which warps weather systems worldwide. Neutral is when weather gets closer to long-term averages or normal, something that hasn’t happened as much recently as it used to, said NOAA physical scientist Michelle L’Heureux, who is the lead forecaster of the agency’s ENSO team. But it likely won’t last, she added.

She said there’s a 65% chance that a La Nina, a cooling of the same parts of the Pacific that often has opposite effects, will form in the July, August and September time period. One of the biggest effects of La Nina is that it tends to make Atlantic hurricane season more active, and that storm season starts its peak in August.

“The likelihood of a La Nina coupled with record warm sea surface temperatures is the reason the National Hurricane Center is forecasting an extraordinary hurricane season,” said Kathie Dello, North Carolina’s state climatologist. “States from Texas to Maine are making preparations for an active year.”

Both El Nino and La Nina create “potential hot spots” for extreme weather but in different places and of different types, L’Heureux said.

“La Nina tends to, in the winter, bring drier conditions across the southern tier of the United States and if you put global warming on top of that, that could also mean those drier conditions could intensify into droughts,” L’Heureux said.

That’s because storm systems, mostly in the winter, move slightly northward with a shift in the jet stream during La Nina years, bringing more rain and snow north, L’Heureux said.

Even though a La Nina tends to be cooler, there will likely be a residual effect of the exiting El Nino on global temperatures, L’Heureux said. This year has seen each month breaking global records so far.

No more than 8% of last year’s record heat could be attributed to El Nino and other natural variability, a panel of 57 scientists concluded earlier this month. The rest was from human-caused climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.

A 1999 economic study found that drought from La Nina cost the United States agriculture between $2.2 billion to $6.5 billion, which is far more than the $1.5 billion cost of El Nino. A neutral ENSO is best for agriculture.

Given La Nina’s connection to Atlantic hurricanes and drought in the United States it makes sense that they are generally costlier, but every El Nino and La Nina is different, so people and governments should prepare for them, said meteorologist and economist Michael Ferrari, chief scientific officer of AlphaGeo, a firm that works on financial investments and climate.

The El Nino that just ended “wasn’t a record-breaker in anybody’s book, but it was probably about top five,” L’Heureux said. And it added to overall global temperature and brought more moisture to the southern United States this year, along with drier conditions in parts of South America and Central America, she said. The Horn of Africa got wetter.

Coral reef experts say the combination of record ocean temperatures and the boost of heating from El Nino have led to a major global bleaching event threatening and at times killing vulnerable coral.

Before this year’s El Nino, the world had back-to-back-to-back La Ninas, which is unusual, L’Heureux said. Some studies have shown that the globe should expect more El Ninos and La Ninas — and fewer neutrals — as the world warms, but it’s still an unsettled issue, she said.

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More than three-fifths — 62.9% — of the world’s coral reefs are badly hurting from a bleaching event that began last year and is continuing. That’s nearing the record of 65.7% in 2017, when from 2009 to 2017 about one-seventh of the world’s coral died, said Derek Manzello, coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Coral Reef Watch Program.

When water gets too hot, coral, which are living creatures, bleach and sometimes die.

In the Atlantic, off the Florida coast and in the Caribbean, about 99.7% of the coral reefs have been hit with “very very severe” losses in staghorn and elkhorn species, Manzello said Thursday in NOAA’s monthly climate briefing. Sixty-two countries are seeing damaged coral, with Thailand shutting off a tourist-laden island to try to save the coral there.

Meteorologists say a La Nina — a natural cooling of parts of the Pacific that changes the weather worldwide — is forecast to develop soon and perhaps cool oceans a bit, but Manzello said it may be too little and too late.

“I still am very worried about the state of the world’s coral reefs just because we’re seeing things play out right now that are just very unexpected and extreme,” Manzello said.

“This wouldn’t be happening without climate change. That’s basically the cornerstone of all the ocean warming we’re seeing,” Manzello said. But on top of that are changes in El Nino, the reverse of La Nina and a natural warming of ocean waters; reduced sulfur pollution from ships and an undersea volcano eruption.

Former top NASA climate scientist James Hansen said “acceleration of global warming is now hard to deny” in a new analysis and statement Thursday.

For coral, it comes down to how hot the water is and “things have just gone crazy haywire with ocean temperatures in the last year,” Manzello said. He said hurricanes bring up cool water from deep and benefit coral reefs if they don’t hit them directly.

“Hurricanes can be devastating for reefs,” Manzello. “But in the grand scheme of things and given the current situation we are in on planet Earth, they’re now a good thing essentially, which is kind of mind-blowing.”

On Wednesday, parts of the Atlantic where hurricanes often develop had an ocean heat content — which measures water warmth at depths — equivalent to mid-August, said hurricane researchers Brian McNoldy at the University of Miami and Phil Klotzbach at Colorado State University.

The world’s oceans last month broke a record for the hottest April on record. It was the 13th straight month global seas broke records, and because the oceans are slow to cool or warm, more records are likely, said Karin Gleason, NOAA’s climate monitoring chief.

Coral reefs are key to seafood production and tourism worldwide. Scientific reports have long said loss of coral is one of the big tipping points of future warming as the world nears 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial time. That’s a limit that countries agreed to try to hold to in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

“This is one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet,” said Andrew Pershing, a biological oceanographer who is vice president for science of Climate Central. “It’s an ecosystem that we’re literally going to watch disappear in our lifetimes.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — NASA wants to come up with an out-of-this-world way to keep track of time, putting the moon on its own souped-up clock.

It’s not quite a time zone like those on Earth, but an entire frame of time reference for the moon. Because there’s less gravity on the moon, time there moves a tad quicker — 58.7 microseconds every day — compared to Earth. So the White House Tuesday instructed NASA and other U.S agencies to work with international agencies to come up with a new moon-centric time reference system.

“An atomic clock on the moon will tick at a different rate than a clock on Earth,” said Kevin Coggins, NASA’s top communications and navigation official. “It makes sense that when you go to another body, like the moon or Mars that each one gets its own heartbeat.”

So everything on the moon will operate on the speeded-up moon time, Coggins said.

The last time NASA sent astronauts to the moon they wore watches, but timing wasn’t as precise and critical as it now with GPS, satellites and intricate computer and communications systems, he said. Those microseconds matter when high tech systems interact, he said.

Last year, the European Space Agency said Earth needs to come up with a unified time for the moon, where a day lasts 29.5 Earth days.

The International Space Station, being in low Earth orbit, will continue to use coordinated universal time or UTC. But just where the new space time kicks in is something that NASA has to figure out. Even Earth’s time speeds up and slows down, requiring leap seconds.

Unlike on Earth, the moon will not have daylight saving time, Coggins said.

The White House wants NASA to come up with a preliminary idea by the end of the year and have a final plan by the end of 2026.

NASA is aiming to send astronauts around the moon in September 2025 and land people there a year later.

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For the first time in history, world timekeepers may have to consider subtracting a second from our clocks in a few years because the planet is rotating a tad faster than it used to. Clocks may have to skip a second — called a “negative leap second” — around 2029, a study in the journal Nature said Wednesday.

“This is an unprecedented situation and a big deal,” said study lead author Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. “It’s not a huge change in the Earth’s rotation that’s going to lead to some catastrophe or anything, but it is something notable. It’s yet another indication that we’re in a very unusual time.”

Ice melting at both of Earth’s poles has been counteracting the planet’s burst of speed and is likely to have delayed this global second of reckoning by about three years, Agnew said.

“We are headed toward a negative leap second,” said Dennis McCarthy, retired director of time for the U.S. Naval Observatory who wasn’t part of the study. “It’s a matter of when.”

It’s a complicated situation that involves, physics, global power politics, climate change, technology and two types of time.

Earth takes about 24 hours to rotate, but the key word is about.

For thousands of years, the Earth has been generally slowing down, with the rate varying from time to time, said Agnew and Judah Levine, a physicist for the time and frequency division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The slowing is mostly caused by the effect of tides, which are caused by the pull of the moon, McCarthy said.

This didn’t matter until atomic clocks were adopted as the official time standard more than 55 years ago. Those didn’t slow.

That established two versions of time — astronomical and atomic — and they didn’t match. Astronomical time fell behind atomic time by 2.5 milliseconds every day. That meant the atomic clock would say it’s midnight and to Earth it was midnight a fraction of a second later, Agnew said.

Those daily fractions of seconds added up to whole seconds every few years. Starting in 1972, international timekeepers decided to add a “leap second” in June or December for astronomical time to catch up to the atomic time, called Coordinated Universal Time or UTC. Instead of 11:59 and 59 seconds turning to midnight, there would be another second at 11:59 and 60 seconds. A negative leap second would go from 11:59 and 58 seconds directly to midnight, skipping 11:59:59.

Between 1972 and 2016, 27 separate leap seconds were added as Earth slowed. But the rate of slowing was tapering off.

“In 2016 or 2017 or maybe 2018, the slowdown rate had slowed down to the point that the Earth was actually speeding up,” Levine said.

Earth’s speeding up because its hot liquid core — “a large ball of molten fluid” — acts in unpredictable ways, with eddies and flows that vary, Agnew said.

Agnew said the core has been triggering a speedup for about 50 years, but rapid melting of ice at the poles since 1990 masked that effect. Melting ice shifts Earth’s mass from the poles to the bulging center, which slows the rotation much like a spinning ice skater slows when extending their arms out to their sides, he said.

Without the effect of melting ice, Earth would need that negative leap second in 2026 instead of 2029, Agnew calculated.

For decades, astronomers had been keeping universal and astronomical time together with those handy little leap seconds. But computer system operators said those additions aren’t easy for all the precise technology the world now relies on. In 2012, some computer systems mishandled the leap second, causing problems for Reddit, Linux, Qantas Airlines and others, experts said.

“What is the need for this adjustment in time when it causes so many problems?” McCarthy said.

But Russia’s satellite system relies on astronomical time, so eliminating leap seconds would cause them problems, Agnew and McCarthy said. Astronomers and others wanted to keep the system that would add a leap second whenever the difference between atomic and astronomical time neared a second.

In 2022, the world’s timekeepers decided that starting in the 2030s they’d change the standards for inserting or deleting a leap second, making it much less likely.

Tech companies such as Google and Amazon unilaterally instituted their own solutions to the leap second issue by gradually adding fractions of a second over a full day, Levine said.

“The fights are so serious because the stakes are so small,” Levine said.

Then add in the “weird” effect of subtracting, not adding a leap second, Agnew said. It’s likely to be tougher to skip a second because software programs are designed to add, not subtract time, McCarthy said.

McCarthy said the trend toward needing a negative leap second is clear, but he thinks it’s more to do with the Earth becoming more round from geologic shifts from the end of the last ice age.

Three other outside scientists said Agnew’s study makes sense, calling his evidence compelling.

But Levine doesn’t think a negative leap second will really be needed. He said the overall slowing trend from tides has been around for centuries and continues, but the shorter trends in Earth’s core come and go.

“This is not a process where the past is a good prediction of the future,” Levine said. “Anyone who makes a long-term prediction on the future is on very, very shaky ground.”

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In parka strongholds Burlington, Vermont, and Portland, Maine, the thermometer never plunged below zero. The state of Minnesota called the last three months “the lost winter,” warmer than its infamous “year without a winter” in 1877-1878. Michigan, where mosquitos were biting in February, offered disaster loans to businesses hit by a lack of snow. The Great Lakes set records for low winter ice, with Erie and Ontario “essentially ice-free.”

For a wide swath of the country from Colorado to New Jersey, and Texas to the Carolinas, spring leaves are arriving three to four weeks earlier than the 1991-2020 average, according to the National Phenology Network, which tracks the timing of plants, insects and other natural signs of the seasons.

“Long-term warming combined with El Nino conspired to make winter not show up in the U.S. this year,” said Yale Climate Connections meteorologist Jeff Masters, who co-founded the private firm Weather Underground. Masters said he was bitten by a mosquito in Michigan this year, which he called crazy.

On Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed that the winter of 2023-2024 was the warmest in nearly 130 years of record-keeping for the United States. The Lower 48 states averaged 37.6 degrees (3.1 degrees Celsius), which is 5.4 degrees (3 degrees Celsius) above average.

This is just the latest in a drumbeat of broken temperature records, national and global, that scientists say is mostly from human-caused climate change from the burning of coal, oil and gas.

And it was the warmest U.S. winter by a wide margin. The past three months were 0.82 degrees (0.46 degrees Celsius) warmer than the previous record set eight years ago, which “is a pretty good leap above the previous record,” said Karin Gleason, chief of monitoring at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

Last month was only the third-warmest February on record. But Iowa blew past its warmest February by 2 degrees, while parts of Minnesota were 20 degrees warmer than average for all of February, Gleason said.

On Feb. 11, Great Lakes ice cover hit a February record low of 2.7%.

A strong ridge of high pressure kept the eastern United States warm and dry, while California kept getting hit with atmospheric rivers, she said.

The European climate agency Copernicus earlier this week said it was the warmest winter globally, mostly due to climate change with an added boost from a natural El Nino, which alters weather worldwide and provides extra heat.

In the past 45 years, winter has warmed faster in the United States than it has worldwide, with the Lower 48 states’ winters now averaging 2.2 degrees (1.2 degree Celsius) warmer than in 1980, according to an analysis of NOAA data by The Associated Press.

That’s probably because land warms faster than ocean with much of the United States as land and most of the globe as ocean, Gleason said.

While it is still getting warmer in the United States, since 2000 the rate of extra warming has slowed a bit, NOAA data shows. Winter weather expert Judah Cohen of Atmospheric Environmental Research, a commercial firm outside Boston, blames Arctic Amplification, which is how climate change has made the Arctic warm three to four times more than the rest of the globe and seems to shift weather patterns further south.

As the Arctic warms faster, the jet stream — which moves weather systems across the Earth — wobbles and weakens. That means the cold air trapped at the top of the planet, called the polar vortex, escapes its normal confines and drifts elsewhere, bringing short plunges of frigid air that temporarily counteracts the overall warming trend in places, Cohen said.

That happened briefly in January when winter “just made a cameo appearance in the Lower 48,” Cohen said. But most of the time this year, when the polar vortex went wandering it hit Europe or Asia with bursts of icy air, not the United States, so there wasn’t an offsetting effect on winter American temperatures, he said.

Boston never even got a sniff of single digit temperatures this year, with a winter low of 14 degrees, a record for lack of deep cold.

And snow? Forget about it, at least in the east and north.

In Fort Kent, in far northern Maine, lack of snow canceled an annual dog sled race. The town had had 46.8 inches (119 cm) of snow this year as of last week, a bit more than half as much as usual, the National Weather Service said.

Snow cover in the United States in February was the second lowest on record and third lowest in December, with only January above normal, according to the Rutgers Snow Lab.

There’s consequences to warm winters, said Theresa Crimmins, director of the National Phenology Network.

“Warm winters can also lead to earlier, longer, and more abundant pest seasons, because populations weren’t knocked back by cold,” Crimmins said in an email. “As well, the allergy season can be worse — starting earlier, lasting longer, and resulting in more pollen in the air.”

Because it’s warmer, trees and flowers may bloom early. Washington’s cherry blossoms are predicted to peak about two weeks earlier than they did in 2013. Early blossoming can screw up intricate timing with pollinators and birds.

“Many of the birds that migrate south for the winter use day length as a cue to come north in the spring,” Crimmins said. “In years like this one, where plant and insect activity is cued to start much earlier than usual, the birds can miss out on peak food availability by arriving too late. ”

But there is some good news for California with atmospheric rivers and snowstorms likely to rebuild snowpacks and fill in reservoirs that had been dangerously low until a couple years ago, Gleason said.

Winter weather expert Cohen, who is based outside of Boston, joked that the U.S. no longer has four seasons: “We have two seasons. We have summer and we have November.”

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Associated Press writer Patrick Whittle contributed from Portland, Maine.

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The latest record-breaking in this climate change-fueled global hot streak includes sea surface temperatures that weren’t just the hottest for February, but eclipsed any month on record, soaring past August 2023’s mark and still rising at the end of the month. And February, as well the previous two winter months, soared well past the internationally set threshold for long-term warming, Copernicus reported Wednesday.

The last month that didn’t set a record for hottest month was in May 2023 and that was a close third to 2020 and 2016. Copernicus records have fallen regularly from June on.

February 2024 averaged 13.54 degrees Celsius (56.37 degrees Fahrenheit), breaking the old record from 2016 by about an eighth of a degree. February was 1.77 degrees Celsius (3.19 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the late 19th century, Copernicus calculated. Only last December was more above pre-industrial levels for the month than February was.

In the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world set a goal of trying to keep warming at or below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). Copernicus’ figures are monthly and not quite the same measurement system for the Paris threshold, which is averaged over two or three decades. But Copernicus data shows the last eight months, from July 2023 on, have exceeded 1.5 degrees of warming.

Climate scientists say most of the record heat is from human-caused climate change of carbon dioxide and methane emissions from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. Additional heat comes from a natural El Nino, a warming of the central Pacific that changes global weather patterns.

“Given the strong El Nino since mid-2023, it’s not surprising to see above-normal global temperatures, as El Ninos pump heat from the ocean into the atmosphere, driving up air temperatures. But the amount by which records have been smashed is alarming,” said Woodwell Climate Research Center climate scientist Jennifer Francis, who wasn’t part of the calculations.

“And we also see the ongoing ‘hot spot’ over the Arctic, where rates of warming are much faster than the globe as a whole, triggering a cascade of impacts on fisheries, ecosystems, ice melt, and altered ocean current pattern s that have long-lasting and far-reaching effects,” Francis added.

Record high ocean temperatures outside the Pacific, where El Nino is focused, show this is more than the natural effect, said Francesca Guglielmo, a Copernicus senior climate scientist.

The North Atlantic sea surface temperature has been at record level — compared to the specific date — every day for a solid year since March 5, 2023, “often by seemingly-impossible margins,” according to University of Miami tropical scientist Brian McNoldy.

Those other ocean areas “are a symptom of greenhouse-gas trapped heat accumulating over decades,” Francis said in an email. “That heat is now emerging and pushing air temperatures into uncharted territory.”

“These anomalously high temperatures are very worrisome,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald. “To avoid even higher temperatures, we need to act quickly to reduce CO2 emissions.”

This was the warmest winter — December, January and February — by nearly a quarter of a degree, beating 2016, which was also an El Nino year. The three-month period was the most any season has been above pre-industrial levels in Copernicus record keeping, which goes back to 1940.

Francis said on a 1-to-10 scale of how bad the situation is, she gives what’s happening now “a 10, but soon we’ll need a new scale because what’s a 10 today will be a five in the future unless society can stop the buildup of heat-trapping gases.”

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Earth last year shattered global annual heat records, flirted with the world’s agreed-upon warming threshold and showed more signs of a feverish planet, the European climate agency said Tuesday.

The European climate agency Copernicus said the year was 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.66 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times. That’s barely below the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit that the world hoped to stay within in the 2015 Paris climate accord to avoid the most severe effects of warming.

And January 2024 is on track to be so warm that for the first time a 12-month period will exceed the 1.5-degree threshold, Copernicus Deputy Director Samantha Burgess said. Scientists have repeatedly said that Earth would need to average 1.5 degrees of warming over two or three decades to be a technical breach of the threshold.

The 1.5 degree goal “has to be (kept) alive because lives are at risk and choices have to be made,” Burgess said. “And these choices don’t impact you and I but they impact our children and our grandchildren.”

The record heat made life miserable and sometimes deadly in Europe, North America, China and many other places last year. But scientists say a warming climate is also to blame for more extreme weather events, like the lengthy drought that devastated the Horn of Africa, the torrential downpours that wiped out dams and killed thousands in Libya and the Canada wildfires that fouled the air from North America to Europe.

In a separate Tuesday press event, international climate scientists who calculate global warming’s role in extreme weather, the group’s leader, Imperial College climate scientist Friederike Otto said “we definitely see in our analysis the strong impact of it being the hottest year.”

The World Weather Attribution team only looks at events that affect at least 1 million people or kill more than 100 people. But Otto said her team was overwhelmed with more than 160 of those in 2023, and could only conduct 14 studies, many of them on killer heat waves. “Basically every heat wave that is occurring today has been made more likely and is hotter because of human-induced climate change,” she said.

The United States lurched through 28 weather disasters last year that caused at least $1 billion in damage, smashing the old record of 22 set in 2020, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Tuesday. The number of these costly disasters, which are adjusted to account for inflation, has soared, averaging only three per year in the 1980s and just under six per year in the 1990s.

The U.S. billion-dollar disasters last year included a drought, four floods, 19 severe storms, 2 hurricanes, a wildfire and a winter storm. They combined to kill 492 people and cause nearly $93 billion in damage, according to NOAA.

Antarctic sea ice hit record low levels in 2023 and broke eight monthly records for low sea ice, Copernicus reported.

Copernicus calculated that the global average temperature for 2023 was about one-sixth of a degree Celsius (0.3 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the old record set in 2016. While that seems a small amount in global record-keeping, it’s an exceptionally large margin for the new record, Burgess said. Earth’s average temperature for 2023 was 14.98 degrees Celsius (58.96 degrees Fahrenheit), Copernicus calculated.

“It was record-breaking for seven months. We had the warmest June, July, August, September, October, November, December,” Burgess said. “It wasn’t just a season or a month that was exceptional. It was exceptional for over half the year.”

There are several factors that made 2023 the warmest year on record, but by far the biggest factor was the ever-increasing amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that trap heat, Burgess said. Those gases come from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.

Other factors including the natural El Nino — a temporary warming of the central Pacific that alters weather worldwide — other natural oscillations in the Arctic, southern and Indian oceans, increased solar activity and the 2022 eruption of an undersea volcano that sent water vapor into the atmosphere, Burgess said.

Malte Meinshausen, a University of Melbourne climate scientist, said about 1.3 degrees Celsius of the warming comes from greenhouse gases, with another 0.1 degrees Celsius from El Nino and the rest being smaller causes.

Copernicus records only go back to 1940 and are based on a combination of observations and forecast models. Other groups, including the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office and Berkeley Earth go back to the mid-1800s and will announce their calculations for 2023 on Friday, with expectations of record-breaking marks.

The Japanese Meteorological Agency, which uses similar techniques as Copernicus and goes back to 1948, late last month estimated that it was the warmest year at 1.47 degrees Celsius (2.64 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. The University of Alabama Huntsville global dataset, which uses satellite measurements rather than ground data and dates to 1979, last week also found it the hottest year on record, but not by as much.

Though actual observations only date back less than two centuries, several scientists say evidence from tree rings and ice cores suggest this is the warmest the Earth has been in more than 100,000 years.

“It basically means that our cities, our roads, our monuments, our farms, in practice all human activities never had to cope with the climate this warm,” Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo said at a Tuesday press conference. “There were simply no cities, no books, agriculture or domesticated animals on this planet the last time the temperature was so high.”

For the first time, Copernicus recorded a day where the world averaged at least 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) more than pre-industrial times. It happened twice and narrowly missed a third day around Christmas, Burgess said.

And for the first time, every day of the year was at least one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times. For nearly half the year — 173 days — the world was 1.5 degrees warmer than the mid-1800s.

Meinshausen, the Australian climate scientist, said it’s natural for the public to wonder whether the 1.5-degree target is lost. He said it’s important for people to keep trying to rein in warming.

“We are not abolishing a speed limit, because somebody exceeded the speed limit,” he said. “We double our efforts to step on the brakes.”

But Buontempo said it’s only going to get hotter: “Following the current trajectory in a few years time the record-breaking year of 2023 will probably be remembered as a cold year.”

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Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.