The world has just endured its hottest August on record, matching the previous high set in July 2023, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). The finding, based on satellite and observational data, confirms a summer that scientists say was unlike any other in the modern instrumental record.
Global average air temperature for the month reached 16.96C, effectively tying July 2023’s mark within a margin of about 0.01C. That figure sits 1.65C above the pre-industrial baseline measured between 1850 and 1900, the period before large-scale fossil fuel burning began altering the climate.
A warning sign, not yet a breach
The 1.65C reading temporarily exceeds the 1.5C limit that nearly 200 countries agreed to try to avoid under the 2015 Paris Agreement, a target meant to stave off the most severe consequences of climate change. Copernicus scientists stress that a single hot month does not mean that long-term target has been formally breached, since it is measured as an average over decades. But it does illustrate how close the world is tracking to that line.
“A remarkable month in the global climate record,” said Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate at Copernicus, adding that its effects are “increasingly being felt by communities, economies and ecosystems across the world.”
Researchers attribute the extreme heat to a combination of long-term human-caused warming and a strengthening El Niño, a natural climate pattern in which unusually warm waters in the eastern Pacific release stored heat into the atmosphere. Copernicus scientists say this El Niño could become one of the most powerful on record, with its full impact on global temperatures still to be felt over the coming year.
Europe’s hottest summer, rivers running dry
Western Europe recorded its warmest summer since records began, surpassing the previous high set in 2003, a summer remembered for a deadly heatwave across the continent. In the UK, the Met Office confirmed it was the hottest summer since national records began in 1884, and calculated that human-caused climate change made such heat around 130 times more likely.
The heat, which began building in May, brought severe drought to the UK, France, Hungary, Romania and Serbia. Major waterways including the Rhine, Danube and Dnieper saw exceptionally low flows, conditions that typically affect shipping, irrigation and hydropower generation across the region. Global sea surface temperatures also hit a new daily high, extending a run of unprecedented ocean warmth.
“The evidence is irrefutable: this is the spiralling price of humanity’s fossil fuel addiction, and the global climate crisis it is fuelling,” said Simon Stiell, the UN’s Climate Change Executive Secretary.
Clair Barnes, an extreme weather researcher at Imperial College London, said the summer’s heat carried “a very real human cost,” pointing to disruption in schools, added strain on hospitals and effects on food production across the affected countries.
According to BBC News, which first reported the Copernicus findings, the record adds to a string of unusually hot months stretching back over the past year, reinforcing scientists’ warnings that such extremes are becoming markedly more frequent as the planet continues to warm.
This article is free to read. It always will be — no paywall, no account, no tracking.
