Heatwaves, drought, extreme fires were the main features of this summer.
According to the European Copernicus observatory, the average global temperatures in the three summer months (June, July, August) were the highest ever recorded and broke the previous record set in 2023.
“Over the past three months, the world has experienced the hottest June and hottest August on record, the hottest day on record and the hottest summer on record,” alarmedly summarized Samantha Burgess, the deputy director of the climate change service (C3S) at the Copernicus observatory, in a press release released.
“This record sequence increases the likelihood that 2024 will be the warmest year on record,” surpassing the previous record set last year, he added, due to increases in human-caused greenhouse gas concentrations. activity.
Countries such as Spain, Japan, Australia (in the midst of a southern hemisphere winter) and provinces in China announced this week that they had recorded record high temperatures in August.
On a global scale, August 2024 equaled the temperature record for the corresponding month of any year, held by that of 2023, 1.51°C above the average of the pre-industrial period (1850-1900), in other words above the limit of 1.5°C, which was the most ambitious goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement.
This emblematic limit has been exceeded in 13 of the last 14 months, according to data from the Copernicus institute (which differ slightly from the data of corresponding bodies in the US, Japan and Britain).
In the past ten months, the average temperature was 1.64°C above pre-industrial times, according to the same source. 2023 ended with an average global temperature of 1.48°C and 2024, marked by heatwaves, droughts and extreme floods in turn, has a strong chance of being the year to exceed the threshold.
However, this anomaly must be observed for decades in order to consider that the climate, which during this time is considered to be about 1.2° Celsius above the pre-industrial era, is now stabilizing at a level above 1.5° Celsius.
Copernicus records began to be kept in 1940, but average temperatures have not been recorded for at least 120,000 years, according to paleoclimate data, drawn mostly from ice sheets and sediments.
Repeated global heat records are fueled by unprecedented warming of the oceans—which cover 70% of the Earth’s surface—bodies of water that absorb 90% of excess heat due to human activity: the average sea surface temperature is maintained to well above normal levels from May 2023, which makes for much more severe phenomena such as cyclones.
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