August hottest month ever recorded globally, EU monitor announced
The EU climate monitor said Thursday that August was the hottest single month ever recorded globally and that summer in western Europe was the warmest it had measured.
This August has been the hottest month ever recorded in Earth's history due to a dangerous combination of human-caused climate change and a supersized El Niño, according to the European climate service Copernicus.The temperatures soared far past a key climate threshold, pushing the globe and the Northern Hemisphere into their hottest summer in recorded history.Last month, the world averaged 16.96 degrees Celsius, which was technically one-hundredth of a degree Celsius higher than the all-time global mark set in July 2023.
Globally, August was 1.65 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, far exceeding the longer-term 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold set by the 2015 Paris climate agreement. The eight hottest months on record have all been from July 2023 onward, according to Copernicus data.Global monthly ocean temperatures in August tied a March 2024 all-time record for the warmest month recorded, while August 22 set a record for the hottest day recorded in the world's seas, according to Copernicus.Fossil fuels and El Niño are blamedSeveral scientists said that while El Niño is a factor, this natural and temporary warming of parts of the Pacific that warps and warms weather globally is nowhere near as big a cause as the heat-trapping gases emitted as humans burn coal, oil and natural gas.“
While El Niño is starting to ramp up the heat, the underlying driver remains our relentless burning of fossil fuels. Climate change makes every El Niño hotter, and until we stop burning coal, oil, and gas, these record-shattering months will simply keep on coming," said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London.Burgess said El Niño generally adds only one or two tenths of a degree Celsius to the global temperature, with the overwhelming rest of the heat coming from the burning of fossil fuels.This El Niño is forecast, however, to break records for strength in the coming months.
And as temperatures continue to rise, heat waves, storms, floods and wildfires will get more frequent and more dangerous, said Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe." It is time to stop acting surprised"“It is now time to stop acting surprised that our warming planet keeps getting warmer. This is occurring exactly as forecast by scientists literally decades ago,” Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler said.
“The interesting question is not whether we will keep breaking heat records, but whether we’re going to do anything about it or just stand there while the climate train runs us over.”“ Our climate system is really operating well outside the range we would have expected just a decade ago,” Samantha Burgess, strategic climate lead for Copernicus, said. “We've transitioned from climate being very abstract and perhaps impacting the global South or far away places to climate impacting and disrupting our daily lives with schools closing, hospitals being overwhelmed, roads melting, train lines buckling.
And the reality is we will get more of these conditions that we've seen this summer.” Copernicus data goes back to 1940. NOAA data for the United States goes back to 1895, and global data, which generally matches Copernicus data but takes longer to calculate, dates back to 1880.