Thousands of people were treated for heatstroke in Pakistan last month after a world record-breaking day in June
The European weather agency Copernicus said the planet has been experiencing record-breaking heat for over a year, and the trend continued into June.
Scientists say there’s hope the planet’s record heatwave will soon come to an end, but the climate chaos that comes with it isn’t over yet.
Copernicus said in its announcement early Monday that June was the hottest month on record for global temperatures and the 12th consecutive month that it has been 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times.
“This is a stark warning that we are approaching this very important limit set out in the Paris Agreement,” Nicolas Julien, a senior climate scientist at Copernicus, said in an interview. “Global temperatures are continuing to rise, and the pace is rapid.”
The 1.5 degree figure is important because it’s the limit of warming that nearly all countries in the world agreed to in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, but Julien and other climate scientists say that limit won’t be exceeded until after a prolonged period of extreme heat, around 20 to 30 years.
“This is not just a statistical anomaly, but highlights the ongoing change in the climate,” Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement.
According to Copernicus, the global average temperature for June 2024 was 62 degrees Fahrenheit (16.66 degrees Celsius), 1.2 degrees Celsius (0.67 degrees Celsius) warmer than the average temperature for that month over the past 30 years. This beat the previous year’s hottest June by 0.25 degrees Celsius (0.14 degrees Celsius) and made it the third-hottest month in the Copernicus record, which dates back to 1940, after July and August of last year.
While records aren’t broken every month, “they’ve been broken significantly over the last 13 months,” Julien said.
“How bad is this?” wondered Andrew Dessler, a meteorologist at Texas A&M University who was not involved in the report. “For the wealthy, right now, it’s an expensive inconvenience. For the poor, it’s a pain. In the future, the amount of wealth that’s merely inconvenienced will increase, and most people will suffer.”
Even without reaching the long-term 1.5°C threshold, “we’re seeing the effects of climate change — these extreme weather events,” Julien said — meaning worsening floods, storms, droughts and heat waves.
According to Copernicus, June’s heatwaves hit southeastern Europe, Turkey, eastern Canada, the western United States, Mexico, Brazil, northern Siberia, the Middle East, North Africa and western Antarctica particularly hard. In Pakistan last month, doctors had to treat thousands of people with heatstroke as temperatures reached 117 degrees Fahrenheit (47 degrees Celsius).
June also marked the 15th consecutive month of record-breaking temperatures in the world’s oceans, which cover more than two-thirds of the Earth’s surface area, according to Copernicus data.
Most of that heat comes from long-term warming caused by greenhouse gases emitted by burning coal, oil and natural gas, Julien and other climate scientists said. The overwhelming majority of the heat energy trapped by human-made climate change goes directly into the oceans, where it takes time to heat up and cool down.
The natural cycle of El Niño and La Niña weather patterns, which cause warming and cooling in the central Pacific Ocean and change weather around the world, is also a factor. El Niño events tend to send global temperature records soaring, and a strong one last year ended in June.
Another factor, the scientists say, is that the shipping restrictions have made the air cleaner along the Atlantic shipping route by reducing traditional air-polluting particles such as cooling sulfur, slightly masking the much larger warming effect of greenhouse gases. “This masking effect will become smaller, temporarily increasing the rate of warming already caused by greenhouse gases,” said Tianle Yuan, a climate scientist at NASA and the University of Maryland, Baltimore, who led a study on the impact of the shipping restrictions.
Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with tech company Stripes and the Berkeley Earth Climate Monitoring Group, wrote in a post on X that this year is expected to be record hot through all six months, and that “there is about a 95% chance that 2024 will surpass 2023 and become the warmest year since Earth surface temperature records began in the mid-1800s.”
Copernicus hasn’t yet calculated the probability, Julien said; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration put the chance at 50 percent last month.
Julien said that while average global temperatures in late June and early July were still hot, they were not as warm as last year.
“I think there’s a good chance that July 2024 will be colder than July 2023, and that this streak will end,” Julien said. “We’re not sure yet. Things could change.”
Victoria University climate scientist Andrew Weaver said the data showed the planet was on track for 3 degrees Celsius of warming unless emissions were urgently cut, and he feared that once the record heatwaves end and winter snows arrive, “people will quickly forget the dangers.”
“The world is in danger,” said University of Wisconsin meteorologist Andrea Dutton. “You’re probably feeling it right now. People living along Beryl’s path are experiencing hurricanes generated by extremely warm oceans that are creating a new era of tropical storms that can rapidly intensify and become major hurricanes that cause deaths and damage. Even if you’re not in danger right now, every new temperature record increases the likelihood that climate change will bring danger to you and your loved ones.”
Copernicus uses billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations around the world, which it then reanalyzes with computer simulations. Several other national scientific agencies, including NOAA and NASA, also produce monthly climate calculations, but they take longer, go further back in time and don’t use computer simulations.