On Sunday, July 21, Planet Earth experienced the hottest day ever measured by humans.
The global average temperature continued to rise. PHOTO Shutterstock
This is another heat record broken in the last two years, according to data published on Tuesday by the European climate service Copernicus, euronews.com reports.
Preliminary data from Copernicus show that the average global temperature was 17.09 degrees Celsius on Sunday, surpassing by 0.01°C the record set just last year on July 6. Both Sunday’s record and last year’s break the previous record of 16.8C, which was itself just a few years old, set in 2016.
Without human-induced climate change, records would not be broken nearly as often, and new cold records would be set as often as warm ones.
“What’s really amazing is how big the difference is between the temperature of the last 13 months and the previous temperature records,” said Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo. “We are now in truly uncharted territory, and as the climate continues to warm, we are sure to see new records being broken in the coming months and years.”
Why was it so hot on Sunday?
While 2024 was extremely warm, what Sunday threw into new territory was a much warmer-than-usual Antarctic winter, according to Copernicus. The same thing happened in the southern continent last year, when the record was set in early July.
But Sunday wasn’t just a warmer Antarctica. California’s interior baked with temperatures nearing 40°C, making many wildfires possible in the western US. At the same time, Europe went through its own deadly heat wave.
“It’s certainly a worrying sign after 13 consecutive record months,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climatologist at Berkeley Earth, who now estimates there is a 92 percent chance that 2024 will overtake 2023 as the warmest year on record.
July is generally the warmest month of the year globally, mostly because there is more land in the Northern Hemisphere, so seasonal patterns there drive global temperatures.
Copernicus records date back to 1940, but other global measurements by the US and British governments date even earlier, to 1880. Many scientists, taking this data together with tree rings and ice cores, say that year’s record temperatures past were the highest recorded on the planet in the last 120,000 years. Now the first six months of 2024 have surpassed even these.
How does weather influence climate change and El Niño?
Scientists attribute the heat overload mainly to climate change caused by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, as well as animal husbandry. Other factors include the natural El Nino warming of the central Pacific Ocean, which has since ended.
Less pollution from marine fuels and possibly an undersea volcanic eruption also cause additional warming, but they are not as important as the heat-trapping greenhouse gases, they said.
With the El Nino phenomenon likely to soon be replaced by a cooling La Nina phenomenon, Hausfather said he would be surprised if 2024 sees any more monthly records, but the hot start to the year is likely enough for it to be warmer than last year.
Certainly, Sunday’s record is notable, but “what makes your eyes twitch” is that recent years have been much warmer than previous records, said Victor Gensini, a climatologist at Northern Illinois University who was not part of the Copernicus team. “It’s definitely an imprint of climate change.”
Scientists say warming will continue if we don’t cut greenhouse gas emissions
Michael Mann, a climatologist at the University of Pennsylvania, said the difference between this year’s readings and last year’s is so small and so preliminary that he’s surprised the European Climate Agency is promoting it.
“We should never compare absolute temperatures for individual days,” Mann said in an email.
Yes, it’s a small difference, Gensini said in an interview, but there have been more than 30,500 days since the Copernicus data began in 1940, and this is the hottest of them all.
“What matters is this,” said Andrew Dessler, a climatologist at Texas A&M University. “The warming will continue as long as we keep pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and we have the technology to largely stop it today. What we lack is the political will.”
