by According to the European climate service Copernicus, the series of warmest months that broke the record of more than a year on Earth is simmering during the month of June.
The planet is expected to end the record part of the heat streak soon, but not the climate chaos that came with it, scientists said.
Global temperatures in June were warmest on record for the 13th straight month and the 12th straight month that the world was 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times, Copernicus said in an announcement early Monday Monday.
“It’s a big warning that we’re getting closer to this very important limit set by the Paris Agreement,” Copernicus senior climate scientist Nicolas Julien said in an interview. “The global temperature is constantly increasing. It’s fast paced.”
That 1.5 degree temperature mark is important because it is the warming limit nearly every country in the world agreed to in the 2015 Paris climate accord, although Julien and other meteorologists have said the threshold will not be exceeded until long-term the extended heat – as much as 20 or 30 years.
“This is more than a statistical oddity and highlights ongoing change in our climate,” Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement.
The global average for June 2024 was 62 degrees Fahrenheit (16.66 degrees Celsius), which is 1.2 degrees (0.67 Celsius) above the 30-year average for the month, according to Copernicus. It broke the record for the warmest June, set a year earlier, by a quarter degree (0.14 degrees Celsius) and is the third warmest of any month recorded in the Copernicus records, which go back to 1940, alongside west of last July only and last. August.
It’s not that records are being broken on a monthly basis but that they have been “broken by very significant margins over the last 13 months,” Julien said.
“How bad is this?” asked Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler, who was not part of the report. “For the rich and the currently wealthy, it’s an expensive inconvenience. For the poor he is suffering. In the future the amount of wealth that you must be inconvenienced will increase until the majority of people will suffer.”
Even without hitting the long-term threshold of 1.5 degrees, “we’ve seen the consequences of climate change, these extreme climate events,” Julien said — meaning floods, storms, droughts and worsening heat waves.
The heat of June hit south-east Europe, Turkey, eastern Canada, the western United States and Mexico, Brazil, northern Siberia, the Middle East, northern Africa and western Antarctica, according to Copernicus . Doctors had to treat thousands of heat stroke victims in Pakistan last month as temperatures hit 117 (47 degrees Celsius).
June was also the 15th straight month that the world’s oceans, more than two-thirds of the Earth’s surface, have broken heat records, according to Copernicus data.
Most of this heat comes from long-term warming from greenhouse gases emitted by burning coal, oil and natural gas, Julien and other meteorologists said. A huge amount of the heat energy trapped by human-caused climate change goes directly into the oceans and it takes longer for those oceans to warm and cool.
The natural cycle of El Ninos and La Ninas, which are warming and cooling the central Pacific Ocean, also play a role in changing weather around the world. El Ninos have a tendency to spike global temperature records and the strong El Nino that formed last year ended in June.
Another factor is that the air over the Atlantic shipping lanes is cleaner because of maritime shipping regulations that reduce traditional air polluting particles, such as sulfur, which cause a slight cooling, scientists said. That includes the much larger warming effect of greenhouse gases. That “masking effect became smaller and would temporarily increase the rate of warming” already caused by greenhouse gases, said Tianle Yuan, a climate scientist for NASA and the University of Maryland’s Baltimore Campus who led a study of navigational effects. regulations.
Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, from the technology company Stripes and the climate monitoring group Berkeley Earth, said in a post on X that with the highest heat seen in six months this year, “there is about a 95% chance that 2024 2023 out. will be the warmest year since global surface temperature records began in the mid-1800s.”
Copernicus has not yet calculated the opposite, said Julien. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last month gave it a 50% chance.
Global average daily temperatures in late June and early July, while still warm, were not as warm as last year, Julien said.
“I would say July 2024 will probably be cooler than July 2023 and this streak will end,” Julien said. “It’s not certain yet. Things can change.”
Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria, said the data shows the Earth is on track for a warming of 3 degrees Celsius if emissions are not urgently curbed. And he feared that ending the streak of warm months and winter snows would mean “soon people will forget” the danger.
“Our world is in crisis,” said University of Wisconsin climate scientist Andrea Dutton. “You may be feeling that crisis today – people living in Beryl’s path are experiencing a hurricane that has been fueled by a very warm ocean that has ushered in a new era of tropical storms that could be on the way against quickly in its large deadly and expensive skyscrapers. . Even if you’re not in crisis today, every temperature record we set means that climate change is more likely to bring crisis to your door or to your family.”
Copernicus uses billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations around the world and then reanalyzes it with computer simulations. Some other countries’ science agencies – including NOAA and NASA – also do monthly climate calculations, but they take longer, go back in time and don’t use computer simulations.
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