The summer of 2024 was the world’s hottest on record: EU Climate Change Monitor

The world is coming off the warmest Northern Hemisphere summer on record, the European Union’s climate change monitoring service said on Friday, as global warming continues to intensify.

This year’s boreal summer from June to August passed last summer to become the warmest in the world, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a monthly bulletin.

The exceptional heat increases the likelihood that 2024 will surpass 2023 as the planet’s hottest on record.

“During the last three months of 2024, the globe experienced its hottest June and August, the hottest day on record and the hottest boreal summer on record,” said C3S Deputy Director Samantha Burgess.

If countries don’t urgently cut their planet-warming emissions, extreme weather “will only get more intense,” she said. Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are the main cause of climate change.

The planet’s changing climate continued to fuel disasters this summer. In Sudan, flooding caused by heavy rains last month has affected more than 300,000 people and brought cholera to the war-torn country.

Elsewhere, scientists confirmed that climate change is causing an ongoing severe drought in the Italian islands of Sicily and Sardinia and intensified Typhoon Gaemi, which tore through the Philippines, Taiwan and China in July, leaving more than 100 dead.

Human-caused climate change and the natural El Nino weather phenomenon, which warms surface waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean, both pushed temperatures to record highs earlier in the year.

Copernicus said below-average temperatures in the equatorial Pacific last month indicated a transition to La Nina, which is the cooler counterpart of El Nino.

But that hasn’t stopped unusually high global sea surface temperatures worldwide, with average temperatures in August warmer than the same month in any other year except 2023.

The C3S data set dates back to 1940, which the scientists checked with other data to confirm that this summer was the hottest since the pre-industrial period of 1850.

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