BRUSSELS: The world is experiencing its warmest northern hemisphere summer since records began, the European Union’s climate change monitoring service said on Friday, as global warming continues to intensify.
The boreal summer from June to August this year set new records for warmth, making it the hottest summer ever recorded globally, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a monthly bulletin.
This exceptional heat raises the likelihood that 2024 will surpass 2023 as the hottest year on record. Samantha Burgess, C3S deputy director, stated, “In the past three months, we have seen the hottest June, the hottest August, the hottest single day, and the warmest boreal summer ever documented.” She warned that without urgent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, extreme weather events will only grow more severe. Fossil fuel emissions remain the primary driver of climate change.
This summer’s altered climate contributed to various disasters. In Sudan, severe flooding from recent heavy rains affected over 300,000 people and brought cholera to the conflict-ridden region. In Italy, climate change was confirmed as a factor in the severe drought impacting Sicily and Sardinia. Additionally, Typhoon Gaemi, which devastated the Philippines, Taiwan, and China in July, was intensified by climate change, resulting in over 100 fatalities.
Record-breaking temperatures earlier this year were driven by both human-induced climate change and the El Niño phenomenon, which warms the eastern Pacific Ocean’s surface waters. However, Copernicus noted a shift to La Niña conditions last month, marked by below-average temperatures in the equatorial Pacific. Despite this shift, global sea surface temperatures remained unusually high, with August’s average temperatures being among the hottest ever recorded, surpassed only by August 2023.
C3S confirmed that their dataset, which dates back to 1940 and is cross-checked with other sources, indicates that this summer was the hottest since the pre-industrial period of the 1850s.
