Samantha Burgess can rarely deliver good news. But what the deputy head of the EU's climate change service Copernicus was forced to report on Monday went beyond the now regular negative records from climate research: In the past 12 months, the global average temperature crossed the 1.5 degree mark for the first time compared to the pre-industrial era. For a year now, higher temperatures have been recorded month after month in the oceans than ever before in the history of measurements. What's particularly worrying about this is that the sudden warming of the oceans was not predicted by climate models, and to this day experts still don't know how to explain it.