Filenews 11 June 2025
The world experienced the second-warmest May since records began to be kept, a month in which climate change fuelled a record-breaking heatwave in Greenland, scientists said on Tuesday.
Last month was the second warmest May the Earth has known – surpassed only by May 2024 – closing the second warmest spring (March-May) ever recorded in the northern hemisphere, the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) announced in its monthly bulletin.
Earth's surface temperatures were an average of 1.4 degrees Celsius higher than in the pre-industrial period of 1850-1900, when humans began burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale, according to C3S. This caused a period of extreme heat, during which in 21 of the last 22 months the average global temperature was 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels – although scientists warned that this period is unlikely to last.
"While this may provide a respite for the planet, we expect the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold to be exceeded again in the near future because the temperature of the climate system continues to rise," said C3S director Carlo Buodebo.
The main cause of climate change is greenhouse gas emissions due to the burning of fossil fuels. Last year was the warmest on record.
A separate study, released today by climate scientists World Weather Attribution, found that man-made climate change caused a record-breaking heatwave in Iceland and Greenland last month, about 3 degrees Celsius warmer than it would otherwise have been, contributing to a massive additional melting of Greenland's ice.
From May 15 to 21, the ice melted 17 times faster than the historical average in Greenland, the World Weather Attribution team announced. In Iceland, the temperature exceeded 26 degrees Celsius on May 15, the first time this has happened on this island located on the edge of the Arctic.
"The temperatures observed in May in Iceland break all records, more than 13 degrees Celsius exceeding the average of May's maximum daily temperatures for the period 1991-2020," according to the WWA study. During the month of May, 94% of the stations recorded new temperature records, according to the local meteorological institute.
In eastern Greenland, the warmest day had a temperature 3.9 degrees Celsius higher than in the pre-industrial era, the WWA said.
"A heat wave of around 20 degrees Celsius doesn't seem like an extreme phenomenon for most people around the world, but it's a really big problem for this region. and this massively affects the whole world," said Frederick Otto, of Imperial College London, one of the study's authors.
The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world, according to the scientific journal "Nature". "Even countries with cold climates are experiencing unprecedented temperatures," said Sarah Kee, one of the study's authors and a researcher at the Royal Meteorological Institute in the Netherlands.
C3S's records date back to 1940 and are compared with global temperature records dating back to 1850.
