Last month tied July 2023 as the planet’s hottest month on record, European scientists said on Thursday, as human-caused warming pushes the Northern Hemisphere’s muggiest, most uncomfortable time of year into new realms of stickiness and discomfort.
Dangerous heat hammered Europe for the fifth time since May. Temperatures soared into the triple digits across the southern United States from California to Texas. South Korea recorded its highest temperature reading in modern history: 108.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the southern city of Yangsan on Aug. 2.
August tied the record for the oceans’ hottest month in history as well, scientists said, as El Niño conditions caused warm water to accumulate at the surface of the tropical Pacific. This extra warmth will spread to the rest of the planet in the months ahead, making the globe’s average temperatures likely to break more records through the end of the year and into 2027.
“These observations show how climate change is driving extremes across both the atmosphere and the oceans,” said Samantha Burgess, a climate scientist at Copernicus, the European Union’s climate monitoring service, which published the analysis of August temperatures. “The impacts of these conditions are increasingly being felt by communities, economies and ecosystems across the world.”
August’s sweltering temperatures capped the warmest summer on record for both Western Europe and the contiguous United States. Across the lower 48 states, the average temperature last month was 75.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest on record for August and 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Wednesday.
Summer in the Northern Hemisphere is also the warmest time of year for the planet as a whole. The reason is that the sun’s energy heats the air above land more than it does the air above water, and most of Earth’s land lies north of the Equator.
According to Copernicus, the average air temperature at the planet’s surface last month was 1.65 degrees Celsius, or roughly three degrees Fahrenheit, higher than it was at the start of the industrial age, when large-scale burning of fossil fuels began raising global temperatures.
That made August the first month since last November when global warming exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius, an important number in humanity’s efforts to curb climate change.
More than a decade ago, nearly all nations agreed at a global summit in Paris to try to keep global warming “well below” two degrees Celsius and, ideally, to limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
In a report last week, the United Nations declared that the world would not achieve that second, more ambitious goal and predicted that, within the next few years, average global warming would surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius. By 2100, warming could peak at 1.8 degrees Celsius if governments are highly successful at slowing warming, or at 2.6 degrees Celsius or higher if they aren’t, the report said.
The goal now, the U.N. report said, should be to bring temperatures back down as quickly as possible, both by slashing greenhouse gas emissions and by developing novel technologies to draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The world also needs to learn to cope more effectively with the elevated risks of intense hot spells, downpours, wildfires and coastal floods that a warmer planet has created, the U.N. said.
“This is the spiraling price of humanity’s fossil fuel addiction, and the global climate crisis it is fueling,” said Simon Stiell, the head of the U.N. entity that supports the international response to climate change.
Chico Harlan contributed reporting.
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