The summer of “brat,” the Paris Olympics and political conventions may be winding down, but the heat in 2024 is still going strong.
The southwestern United States’ sizzling triple-digit temperatures this week mark the tail end of the hottest summer on record, according to a new European climate report.
“We know that the warming of the planet leads to more intense and extreme climate events, and what we’ve seen this summer has been no exception,” said Julien Nicolas, a climatologist with the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the European Union agency that published the assessment on Wednesday.
Since 2018, the agency has been combining data like weather observations from balloons and satellites with computer models that simulate temperature and precipitation to get a picture of what’s happening around the world. It pairs that picture with past weather conditions reconstructed back to 1940 to compute a global average temperature.
June and August were the hottest June and August on record, according to the models, while July is not quite as clear.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, based in the United States, found that this July was three-hundredths of a Celsius degree hotter than July 2023, while Copernicus determined it was a few hundredths of a degree cooler than last year. For all practical purposes, that created a virtual tie, according to Karin Gleason of NOAA, speaking recently about her department’s findings.
“There are times when all the different data sets have a slightly different statistic,” Ms. Gleason said, referring to the discrepancy between NOAA and Copernicus data. “But they’re all saying essentially the same thing. We’re at or near record pace.”
That led the planet to the hottest day on record this July. And all of these records combined to increase the likelihood that 2024 will become the hottest year ever, Copernicus said.
That heat increases the likelihood of extreme weather events like heat waves, heavy rainfall and flooding, and wildfires. Last year, Canadian wildfires were so expansive that they released more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than all but three countries: the United States, China and India.
“We have extreme heat and record-breaking precipitation events in too many places to list,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
“In the areas that have been hardest hit this summer, I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of heat-related deaths also increased,” said Jeffrey Howard, an associate professor in public health at the University of Texas at San Antonio, who analyzed data showing heat-related deaths had doubled in the United States in recent decades.
The Copernicus report also noted that August was the 13th out of 14 months in which global temperatures had climbed 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, beyond preindustrial average temperatures for that period, a threshold set by the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.
While it’s only a temporary breach, scientists are debating right now how to assess when and how they would determine that the world had surpassed the 1.5-degree milestone long enough or often enough to determine a trend.
“It’s up to the scientific community to determine when and how we’d know we’ve reached 1.5 degree Celsius as a long-term average,” Dr. Nicolas said. Typically, such a change would be monitored over a period of 20 to 30 years, but computer-model projections might make it possible to determine that change earlier, he said.
“We’re talking about ecosystem change on a global scale that’s going to affect all of us,” said Ashley Ward, director of the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University. “Our energy systems, built environment, and medical services were never built with this type of temperature regime in mind.”
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