Earth’s yearlong streak of record hot months continued to simmer until June, according to European climate service Copernicus.
There is hope that the planet will soon see an end to the record part of the heat wave, but not the climate chaos that accompanied it, scientists said.
The global temperature in June was a record high for the 13th consecutive month and marked the 12th consecutive month that the world was 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than in pre-industrial times, Copernicus said in an announcement on Monday.
“It is a strong warning that we are approaching this very important limit set by the Paris Agreement,” said Nicolas Julien, senior climate scientist at Copernicus, in an interview. “Global temperature continues to increase. It’s been happening at a rapid pace.”
What 1.5 degree temperature mark It’s important because that’s the warming threshold agreed to by nearly every country in the world in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, although Julien and other meteorologists have said the threshold won’t be exceeded until there is a long-term duration of prolonged heat – as much as 20 or 30 years.
“This is more than a statistical oddity and highlights an ongoing change in our climate,” Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement.
The globe in June 2024 averaged 62 degrees Fahrenheit (16.66 degrees Celsius), which is 1.2 degrees (0.67 Celsius) above the 30-year average for the month, according to Copernicus. It broke the record for the hottest June, set a year earlier, by a quarter of a degree (0.14 degrees Celsius) and is the third hottest of any month recorded in Copernicus records dating back to 1940, behind only July last and last month. August.
It’s not that records are being broken monthly, but they are being “broken by very substantial margins over the last 13 months,” Julien said.
“How bad is it?” asked Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler, who was not part of the report. “For the rich and for now, it is an expensive inconvenience. For the poor it is suffering. In the future, the amount of wealth you need to have just to be bothered will increase until most people are suffering.”
Even without reaching the 1.5-degree threshold in the long term, “we have seen the consequences of climate change, of these extreme weather events,” said Julien – which means worsening floods, storms, droughts and heat waves.
The June heat hit southeastern Europe, Turkey, eastern Canada, western United States and Mexico, Brazil, northern Siberia, the Middle East, northern Africa and western Antarctica, according to Copernicus. Doctors had to treat thousands of heatstroke victims in Pakistan last month when temperatures reached 117 (47 degrees Celsius).
June was also the 15th consecutive month in which the world’s oceans, more than two-thirds of the Earth’s surface, broke heat records, according to Copernicus data.
Most of this heat comes from the long-term warming of greenhouse gases emitted by burning coal, oil and natural gas, Julien and other forecasters said. An overwhelming amount of the thermal energy trapped by human-caused climate change goes directly to the ocean, and those oceans take longer to warm and cool.
The natural cycle of El Ninos and La Ninas, which warm and cool the central Pacific and alter climate around the world, also plays a role. El Niños tend to raise global temperature records, and the strong El Niño that formed last year ended in June.
Another factor is that the air over Atlantic shipping channels is cleaner due to maritime regulations that reduce traditional air pollution particles, such as sulfur, that cause some cooling, scientists said. This slightly masks the much greater warming effect of greenhouse gases. This “masking effect would slow and temporarily increase the rate of warming” that is already caused by greenhouse gases, said Tianle Yuan, a climate scientist at NASA and the University of Maryland Baltimore Campus who led a study on the effects of maritime transport regulations.
Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of technology company Stripes and climate monitoring group Berkeley Earth said in a post on It will be the hottest year since global surface temperature records began in the mid-19th century.”
Copernicus has not yet calculated the probabilities of this, Julien said. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last month gave it a 50% chance.
Global average daily temperatures in late June and early July, while still warm, were not as high as last year, Julien said.
“It is likely, I would say, that July 2024 will be colder than July 2023 and that this wave will end,” Julien said. “It’s still not certain. Things can change.”
Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria, said data shows the Earth is on track for 3 degrees Celsius warming if emissions are not urgently reduced. And he feared that the end of the string of record warm months and the arrival of winter snows meant that “people would soon forget” the danger.
“Our world is in crisis,” said Andrea Dutton, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin. “Perhaps you are feeling this crisis today – those living in Beryl’s path are experiencing a hurricane that is powered by an extremely hot ocean which has ushered in a new era of tropical storms that can quickly intensify into deadly and costly major hurricanes. Even if we are not in crisis today, every temperature record we set means that climate change is more likely to bring crisis to your doorstep or to your loved ones.”
Copernicus uses billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations around the world and then re-analyzes them with computer simulations. Scientific agencies in several other countries – including NOAA and NASA – also produce monthly climate calculations, but they take longer, go further back in time and do not use computer simulations.
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