Climate Crisis

This summer was world’s hottest on record, EU climate change monitor says

Exceptional heat reported by Copernicus service increases the likelihood that 2024 will be planet’s warmest year as global warming intensifies

The aftermath of a forest fire in the Brasilia National Forest region in Brazil on September 4th, 2024. Photograph: SERGIO LIMA/AFP via Getty Images
The aftermath of a forest fire in the Brasilia National Forest region in Brazil on September 4th, 2024. Photograph: SERGIO LIMA/AFP via Getty Images
Fri Sept 06 2024 - 06:55

The world is emerging from its warmest northern hemisphere summer since records began, the European Union’s climate change monitoring service said on Friday, as global warming continues to intensify.

The boreal summer of June to August this year blew past last summer to become the world's warmest, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a monthly bulletin.

The exceptional heat increases the likelihood that 2024 will outrank 2023 as the planet’s warmest year on record.

"During the past three months of 2024, the globe has experienced the hottest June and August, the hottest day on record, and the hottest boreal summer on record," said C3S deputy director Samantha Burgess.

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Unless countries urgently reduce their planet-heating emissions, extreme weather "will only become more intense", she said. Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are the main cause of climate change.

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The planet's changed climate continued to fuel disasters this summer. In Sudan, flooding from heavy rains last month affected more than 300,000 people and brought cholera to the war-torn country.

Elsewhere, scientists confirmed climate change is driving a severe ongoing drought on the Italian islands of Sicily and Sardinia, and it intensified Typhoon Gaemi, which tore through the Philippines, Taiwan and China in July, leaving more than 100 people dead.

Human-caused climate change and the El Niño natural weather phenomenon, which warms the surface waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean, both pushed temperatures to record highs earlier in the year.

Copernicus said below-average temperatures in the equatorial Pacific last month indicated a shift to La Niña, which is El Niño’s cooler counterpart.

But that didn't prevent unusually high global sea surface temperatures worldwide, with average temperatures in August hotter than in the same month of any other year except for 2023.

The Copernicus dataset goes back to 1940, which the scientists cross-checked with other data to confirm that this summer was the hottest since the 1850 pre-industrial period. – Reuters