Monday is the hottest day recorded on Earth, beating Sunday’s record, says European climate agency

Monday was recorded as the hottest day ever, beating a record set the day beforeas countries around the world, from Japan to Bolivia to the United States, continue to feel the heat, according to the European Climate Change Service.

Provisional satellite data published by Copernicus on Wednesday morning showed that Monday broke the previous day’s record by 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.1 degrees Fahrenheit).

Climate scientists say the world is now as hot as it was 125,000 years ago due to human-caused climate change. Although scientists cannot be certain that Monday was the hottest day during that period, average temperatures have not been this high since long before humans developed agriculture.

The temperature rise in recent decades is in line with what climate scientists predicted would happen if humans continued to burn fossil fuels at an increasing rate.

“We are at a time when weather and climate records are often stretched beyond our tolerance levels, resulting in an insurmountable loss of lives and livelihoods,” Roxy Mathew Koll, climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology.

Preliminary Copernicus data shows the global average temperature on Monday was 17.15 degrees Celsius, or 62.87 degrees Fahrenheit. The previous record before this week was set just a year ago. Before last year, the hottest day on record was in 2016, when temperatures averaged 16.8 degrees Celsius, or 62.24 degrees Fahrenheit.

While 2024 was extremely warm, what this week ushered in new territory was a warmer-than-normal Antarctic winter, according to Copernicus. The same thing happened on the southern continent last year, when the record was set in early July.

Copernicus records go back to 1940, but other global measurements taken by the US and UK governments go back even further, to 1880. Many scientists, taking this data into account along with tree rings and ice cores, say last year’s record highs were hottest than the planet has been in about 120,000 years. Now, the first six months of 2024 have reached break-even.

Without human-caused climate changeScientists say extreme temperature records would not be broken as often as they have been in recent years.

Former UN climate talks chief Christiana Figueres said “we will all burn and fry” if the world does not immediately change course. “A third of global electricity can be produced by solar and wind energy alone, but specific national policies must enable this transformation,” she said.

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AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this report.

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