Driven by oceans that won’t cool down, an unseasonably warm Antarctica and worsening climate change, Earth’s record hot streak dialled up this week, making Sunday, then Monday, the hottest days humans have measured, according to the European climate service.
There’s a good chance that when the data comes in for Tuesday, it will be three straight days of global record breaking heat, said Carlo Buontempo, the director of the European climate service Copernicus. “These peaks are not normally isolated,” he said.
Provisional satellite data published by Copernicus on Wednesday shows that Monday was 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.1 degree Fahrenheit) hotter than Sunday, which was .01 degrees Celsius hotter (0.2 degrees Fahrenheit) than the previous hottest day on record, July 6, 2023.
In addition to the warmer oceans and Antarctica, the western United States and Canada and eastern Siberia were especially warm in the last few days, Buontempo said.
This is human-caused climate change in action, according to Buontempo and other scientists.
“The climate is generally warming up as a consequence of the increase in greenhouse gases,” he said.
Some scientists worry that human-caused climate change is accelerating. Buontempo said the high temperatures in recent days are consistent with that idea but that it is too soon to reach that conclusion.
“It may be the first sign of change in the rate of the temperature increase,” Buontempo said. Other scientists do not see signs of acceleration.
The Earth has set heat records for 13 straight months. The global temperature averaged over the past year is more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than pre-industrial times, seeming to exceed the global agreed upon limit for warming. When that threshold was set in 2015, it was meant to apply over 20 or 30 years, not just 12 months, he said.
More than 1,600 places across the globe tied or broke heat records in the past seven days, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Climate scientists say this could be the warmest it has been in 120,000 years because of human-caused climate change. While scientists cannot be certain that Monday was the very hottest day in that period, longer term average temperatures have not been this high since long before humans developed agriculture.
“For most of the last 120,000 years, we were in an ice age and today is clearly warmer than that,” said Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler, adding that studies indicate we are now in the hottest period in the last 10,000 years.
But it’s still a difficult determination to make, said University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann, because data from tree-rings, corals and ice cores don’t go back that far.
“We are in an age where weather and climate records are frequently stretched beyond our tolerance levels, resulting in insurmountable loss of lives and livelihoods,” Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology.
“Deaths from high temperatures show how catastrophic it is not to take stronger action on cutting CO2,” which is the main heat-trapping gas, Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald said in an e-mail.
Copernicus’ preliminary data shows the global average temperature Monday was 17.15 degrees Celsius (62.87 degrees Fahrenheit). The previous record before this week was set just a year ago. Before last year, the previous recorded hottest day was in 2016, when average temperatures were at 16.8 degrees Celsius (62.24 degrees Fahrenheit).
July is generally the hottest month for the planet as a whole, Buontempo said.
While 2024 has been extremely warm, what kicked this week into new territory was a warmer-than-usual Antarctic winter, with temperatures 6 to 10 degrees Celsius (10.8 to 18 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than normal, Buontempo said. The same thing happened on the southern continent last year when the record was set in early July.
If it weren’t for Antarctica, it’s likely the record would not have been broken, Buontempo said.
El Niño – a natural temporary warming of the Pacific that changes weather worldwide and spikes global temperatures – ended earlier this year and a more cooling La Nina is forecast, but the El Niño effect lingers, Buontempo said, adding that oceans have been breaking heat records for 15 months.
Copernicus started keeping heat records in 1940, but measurements by governments in the U.S. and U.K. stretch back to 1880. Buontempo and other scientists say it’s likely 2024 will be hotter than the record-breaking 2023.
Without human-caused climate change, scientists say extreme temperature records would not be broken nearly as frequently as in recent years.
The former head of U.N. climate negotiations, Christiana Figueres, said “we all scorch and fry” if the world doesn’t immediately change course, “but targeted national policies have to enable that transformation.”
Copernicus uses average temperatures for the entire planet to create a global mean temperature. “But ultimately, what is biting us back is not the global mean temperature because nobody lives in the global mean,” Buontempo said. “It’s really what’s happening in our backyard, what’s happening in our rivers and our mountains and so on.”
