Summer of 2024 was world’s hottest on record, says EU climate change monitor
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The exceptional heat increases the likelihood that 2024 will outrank 2023 as the planet's warmest on record.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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BRUSSELS – The world is emerging from its warmest Northern Hemisphere summer since records began, the European Union’s climate change monitoring service said on Sept 6, as global warming continues to intensify.
The boreal summer of June to August in 2024 blew past the 2023 summer to become the world’s warmest, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a monthly bulletin.
The exceptional heat increases the likelihood that 2024 will outrank 2023 as the planet’s warmest on record.
“During the past three months of 2024, the globe has experienced the hottest June and August, the hottest day on record and the hottest boreal summer on record,” C3S deputy director Samantha Burgess said.
Unless countries urgently reduce their planet-heating emissions, extreme weather “will only become more intense”, she added. Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are the main cause of climate change.
The planet’s changed climate continued to fuel disasters in summer. In Sudan, flooding from heavy rains in August affected more than 300,000 people and brought cholera to the war-torn country.
Elsewhere, scientists confirmed climate change is driving a severe ongoing drought on the Italian islands of Sicily and Sardinia. It also intensified Typhoon Gaemi, which tore through the Philippines, Taiwan and China in July, leaving more than 100 people dead.
Human-caused climate change and the El Nino natural weather phenomenon, which warms the surface waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean, both pushed temperatures to record highs earlier in 2024.
C3S said below-average temperatures in the equatorial Pacific in August indicated a shift to La Nina, which is El Nino’s cooler counterpart.
But that did not prevent unusually high global sea surface temperatures worldwide, with average temperatures in August hotter than in the same month of any other year except for 2023.
C3S dataset goes back to 1940, which the scientists cross-checked with other data to confirm that summer in 2024 was the hottest since the 1850 pre-industrial period. REUTERS
