This year’s June-August summer surpassed last year’s to become the warmest on record, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a monthly bulletin.
The exceptional warmth increases the likelihood that 2024 will overtake 2023 as the planet’s warmest year on record.
“Over the last three months of 2024, the planet has experienced the hottest June and August, the hottest day on record, and the hottest northern summer on record,” said C3S Deputy Director Samantha Burgess.
Unless countries urgently cut their planet-warming emissions, extreme weather events “will only intensify,” he said. Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are the main cause of climate change.
The planet’s changing climate continued to bring disasters this summer. In Sudan, flooding caused by heavy rains last month affected more than 300,000 people and brought cholera to the war-torn country.
Meanwhile, scientists have confirmed that climate change is causing severe drought on the Italian islands of Sicily and Sardinia, and intensifying Typhoon Gaemi, which devastated the Philippines, Taiwan and China in July, killing more than 100 people.
Man-made climate change and the natural El Niño weather phenomenon, which warms surface waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean, pushed temperatures to record levels earlier this year.
Copernicus said below-average temperatures in the equatorial Pacific last month indicated a shift toward La Niña, the cooler counterpart of El Niño.
But that didn’t stop sea surface temperatures around the world from being unusually high, with average temperatures in August higher than in the same month in any other year except 2023.
The C3S data set dates back to 1940, and scientists compared it with other data to confirm that this summer was the warmest since the pre-industrial period of 1850.
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