PARIS, France (AFP) — Europe’s climate monitor said Thursday that August was the hottest month ever recorded around the world and warned of worse to come, as an unprecedented El Niño pattern grows stronger.
Global temperatures over land and sea soared to all-time highs in August and capped an extreme summer of heatwaves and wildfires that ranked the hottest on record for western Europe and the contiguous United States.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service said global average air temperatures in August were 16.96C (62.52F) — surpassing by 0.01C the previous record for a single month set in July 2023. The EU monitor said it considered the two months joint-highest given the narrow difference.
Copernicus observations go back to 1940, but evidence from ice cores, tree rings and coral skeletons puts today’s climate in a much starker historical context.
“Humans haven’t seen temperatures as hot as today for, arguably, at least the last 100,000 years,” Samantha Burgess from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which oversees Copernicus, told AFP.
