The European Climate Service reports that Earth’s record hot streak intensified this week, with Sunday and Monday being the hottest days ever recorded by humans. This is due to oceans that refuse to cool off, an unusually warm Antarctica, and intensifying climate change.
Carlo Buontempo, the director of the European climate agency Copernicus, stated that there’s a significant probability the data for Tuesday will show three days in a row of heatwaves that shatter all previous records worldwide. He stated, “These peaks are not normally isolated.”
Monday was 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.1 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than Sunday, which was 0.01 degrees Celsius (0.2 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than the previous hottest day on record, July 6, 2023, according to preliminary satellite data released by Copernicus on Wednesday.
The western United States, Canada, and eastern Siberia were particularly warm in the past few days, in addition to the warmer oceans and Antarctica, according to Buontempo.
Climate change brought on by humans is evident here, as noted by Buontempo and other experts.
“The general increase in greenhouse gases is causing the climate to warm,” he stated.
Scientists fear that the rate of climate change brought on by humans is increasing. Buontempo stated that while the recent high temperatures are in line with that theory, it is still too early to draw that conclusion.
According to Buontempo, “it might be the first indication of a shift in the rate of temperature increase.” There are no indications of acceleration to other scientists.
The past 13 months have seen record high temperatures on Earth. The average global temperature over the last year has risen by more over 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) beyond pre-industrial levels, appearing to surpass the internationally agreed-upon warming threshold. According to him, the threshold’s 2015 setting was intended to last for 20 or 30 years rather than just 12 months.
According to climate scientists, the current temperature may be the highest in 120,000 years due to climate change brought on by humans. Long-term average temperatures have not been this high since well before humans began agriculture, even if scientists cannot be positive that Monday was the hottest day throughout that time.
According to Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler, “we are in the hottest period in the last 10,000 years,” despite the fact that “we were in an ice age for most of the last 120,000 years.”
However, because evidence from tree rings, corals, and ice cores don’t go back that long, Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said it’s still a challenging decision to make.
Climate scientist Roxy Mathew Koll of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology said, “We live in an age where weather and climate records are frequently stretched beyond our tolerance levels, resulting in insurmountable loss of lives and livelihoods.”
According to climate scientist Natalie Mahowald of Cornell University, “deaths from high temperatures show how catastrophic it is not to take stronger action on cutting CO2,” the primary gas that traps heat.
According to early data from Copernicus, Monday’s average worldwide temperature was 17.15 degrees Celsius (62.87 degrees Fahrenheit). Prior to this week, the previous record was established barely a year ago. The highest day on record before last year was in 2016, with average highs of 16.8 degrees Celsius (62.24 degrees Fahrenheit).
According to Buontempo, July is often the planet’s hottest month overall.
Although 2024 has been very warm, an unusually warm Antarctic winter that began this week, with temperatures 6 to 10 degrees Celsius (10.8 to 18 degrees Fahrenheit) above average, broke new ground, according to Buontempo. When the record was set in early July of previous year, the same thing took place on the southern continent.
According to Buontempo, the record probably would not have been broken if not for Antarctica.
El Nino, a brief warming of the Pacific Ocean that occurs naturally and alters weather patterns globally, concluded earlier this year and is expected to be followed by a more cooling La Nina; nevertheless, Buontempo noted that the El Nino influence persists and that for 15 months, ocean temperatures have been smashing heat records.
Although Copernicus began recording heat in 1940, government data in the United States and the United Kingdom date back to 1880. According to Buontempo and other scientists, 2024 will probably be hotter than 2023, which set a record.
Scientists claim that extreme temperature records would not be broken nearly as regularly as they have in recent years if human-caused climate change did not exist.
If the globe doesn’t quickly turn around, “we all scorch and fry,” according to Christiana Figueres, the former leader of U.N. climate negotiations, “but targeted national policies have to enable that transformation.”
Copernicus calculated the global mean temperature using the planet’s average temperatures. But in the end, Buontempo said, “nobody lives in the global mean, so what is biting us back is not the global mean temperature.” “It really is what’s going on in our backyard, in our rivers, in our mountains, and so forth.”
