Almost the entire world’s population was affected by high temperatures between June and August due to human-caused climate change, according to a report released late Thursday.

The Northern Hemisphere summer of 2023 was the hottest on record, with prolonged heatwaves in North America and southern Europe causing devastating fires and increasing mortality levels.

July was the hottest month on record, with average August temperatures 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial times.

Research by Climate Central, a US-based research group, looked at temperatures in 180 countries and 22 regions and concluded that 98% of the world’s population was exposed to warmer than normal temperatures. He also estimated that this event became twice as likely due to carbon dioxide contamination.

“Almost no one on Earth has been spared the effects of warming over the past three months,” said Andrew Pershing, vice president for science at Climate Central.

“In every country we were able to analyze, including the southern hemisphere where this should be the coldest time of the year, we saw temperatures that would have been difficult — and in some cases almost impossible — (to record) without human-induced climate change. “, he added.

Climate Central assesses whether heat waves have become more likely due to climate change by comparing recorded temperatures with those produced by models that remove the influence of greenhouse gases.

According to the report, last summer up to 6.2 billion people on Earth experienced at least one day in which elevated temperatures were recorded, a phenomenon made five times more likely due to climate change.

North America and southern Europe would not have recorded these heatwaves without climate change, said Friederike Otto, a climatologist at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and Environment.

“We looked at individual heat waves,” he said. “They didn’t become five times more likely, they became infinitely more likely, because they wouldn’t have happened without climate change,” he stressed.