BENGALURU, India (AP) — Global temperatures fell a minuscule amount after two days of record highs, making Tuesday just the second hottest day in the world.
The European climate service Copernicus calculated that Tuesday’s global average temperature was 0.01 Celsius (0.01 Fahrenheit) lower than Monday’s all-time high of 17.16 degrees Celsius (62.8 degrees Fahrenheit), which was 0.06 degrees Celsius warmer (0.1 degrees Fahrenheit) than Sunday.
All three days were hotter than Previous hottest day on Earth in 2023.
“The steady beat of records for the hottest days and near-records is worrying for three main reasons. The first is that heat is a killer. The second is that the health impacts of heatwaves become much more serious when events persist. The third is that this year’s record for the hottest days is a surprise,” said Stanford University climate scientist Chris Field.
Field said high temperatures often occur during El Nino years – a natural warming of the equatorial Pacific that triggers weather extremes around the world – but the last El Niño ended in April.
Field said these high temperatures “underscore the severity of the climate crisis.”
“This was, I mean, probably the shortest life record ever,” Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo said on Wednesday, after his agency calculated that Monday had surpassed the record. Sunday. And he predicted that mark would also fall quickly. “We are in uncharted territory.”
Before July 3, 2023, the hottest day measured by Copernicus was 16.8 degrees Celsius (62.2 degrees Fahrenheit) on August 13, 2016. In the last 13 months, this mark has already been surpassed 59 times, from according to Copernicus.
Humanity is now “operating in a world that is already much hotter than it was before,” Buontempo said.
“Unfortunately, people are going to die, and those deaths are preventable,” said Kristie Ebi, a professor of public health and climate at the University of Washington. “Heat is called the silent killer for a reason. People often don’t know they have heat problems until it’s too late.”
In previous heat waves, including 2021 in the Pacific Northwestheat deaths only began to accumulate on the second day, Ebi said.
“At some point, the heat built up internally becomes excessive, so your cells and organs start to heat up,” Ebi said.
Last year, the United States had the highest number of heat deaths recorded in more than 80 years, according to a Associated Press analysis data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The death certificates of more than 2,300 people mentioned excessive heat. The heat killed 874 people in Arizona, 450 in Texas, 226 in Nevada, 84 in Florida and 83 in Louisiana.
Earlier this year, India witnessed prolonged heatwaves that resulted in death of at least 100 people. However, health experts say heat deaths are likely underrated in India and potentially other countries.
The “big driver” of the current heat is greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, Buontempo said. These gases help retain heat by changing the energy balance between the heat coming from the Sun and that escaping from the Earth, meaning the planet retains more thermal energy than before, he said.
Other factors include warming of the Pacific by El Niño; the sun reaching its maximum activity cycle; an explosion of an underwater volcano; and air with fewer heat-reflecting particles due to marine fuel pollution regulations, experts said.
The last 13 months they have all the heat records set. The world’s oceans have broken heat records for 15 consecutive months and the heat of the water, along with an unusually warm Antarctica, are helping to raise temperatures to record levels, Buontempo said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Thursday, Friday and Saturday also set new records for hottest days,” said climate scientist Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria in Canada, which is scorching hot.
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Borenstein reported from Washington.
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Follow Sibi Arasu on X in @sibi123 and Seth Borenstein in @borenbears
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