Average global temperatures in the three months of summer (June, July, August) were the highest ever recorded, breaking the 2023 record, the European Observatory announced Copernicus.

“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 ever recorded,” Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Climate Change Service (C3S) at the Copernicus observatory, summarized with concern in a press release released to the public.

“This record sequence makes it more likely that 2024 will be the hottest year ever recorded,” surpassing the previous record set last year, he added, due to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases released by human activity.

Countries such as Spain, Japan, Australia (in the middle of a southern hemisphere winter) and provinces in China announced this week that they had recorded record high temperatures in August.

China in particular recorded the hottest August since 1961 this year, according to its national meteorological service, clarifying that “the average temperature on a national scale was the highest since the corresponding month in 1961.”

The average temperature in the whole of the Chinese territory reached 22.96 degrees in August, in other words it was 1.5 ° Celsius higher than that of any normal year, the service explained to the press.

The hottest August ever

On a global scale, August 2024 equaled the temperature record for the corresponding month of any year, held by that of 2023, 1.51 ° Celsius 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 target 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 last ten months, the average temperature was 1.64 °C above pre-industrial timesaccording 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 to be considered as the climatewhich is currently considered to be approximately 1.2 °C above pre-industrial times, is now stabilizing at a level above 1.5 °C.

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.

The successive global heat records are fueled by the 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.