by The planet has just marked a “shocking” new milestone of 12 consecutive months of unprecedented heat, according to new data from Copernicus, the European Union’s climate monitoring service.
Every single month from June 2023 to May 2024 was the hottest month on record, Copernicus data showed.
The 12-month heat streak was “remarkable but not surprising” due to human-induced climate change, said Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus, who warned of worse to come. Unless fossil fuel pollution warms the planet, “this series of warmest months will be remembered as relatively cold,” he said.
Copernicus released its data on the same day as UN Secretary-General António Guterres gave an impassioned speech in New York about climate change, slamming fossil fuel companies as “the drivers of climate chaos” and, for the first time, expressly requested by all countries. ban on advertising their fossil fuel products.
Guterres urged world leaders to quickly take control of the spiraling climate crisis or face tipping points. “We are playing Russian roulette with our planet,” he said Wednesday. “We need an exit ramp from the highway to climate hell.”
As temperatures rise, global climate commitments are “hanging by a thread,” he warned.
The Copernicus data showed that every month from July 2023 was at least 1.5 degrees warmer than pre-industrial temperatures, when humans started burning large amounts of planet-warming fossil fuels.
The average global temperature over the past 12 months was 1.63 degrees above these pre-industrial levels.
Under the Paris Agreement in 2015, countries agreed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Although this aim is for warming over years, rather than a single month or year, scientists say this breach is an alarming sign.
“This is a sign of progressively more dangerous climate impacts near the horizon,” said Richard Allan, a climate professor at the University of Reading in the UK.
The news comes as the western United States is experiencing its first heat wave so far this summer with temperatures soaring into the triple digits. But unprecedented heat has already left a trail of death and destruction across the planet this spring.
Dozens of people have died in India in the past few weeks as temperatures push towards 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit); brutal temperatures in Southeast Asia have killed, closed schools and distressed crops; and as the heat rose in Mexico, howler monkeys fell dead from trees.
Warmer air and oceans fuel heavier rain and destructive storms like those that have hit the United States, Brazil, Kenya and the United Arab Emirates, among other nations, this year.
The recent heat “provides a window into a future of extreme heat that challenges the limits of human survival,” said Ben Clarke, a researcher at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute. “It’s critical that people understand that more people are exposed to dangerous and potentially fatal heat,” he told CNN.
“Extreme events driven by climate chaos are increasing, destroying feeds, pumping economies and affecting health,” said Gutteres.
Humanity has had a profound impact on the earth, he said, comparing it to the meteor that started the process of wiping out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
“In the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs,” Guterres said. “We are the meteor. We are not only at risk. We are the danger.”
An even warmer future
Global temperatures are expected to begin falling below record levels in the coming months as El Niño – a natural climate phenomenon that tends to increase the planet’s average temperature – weakens.
But that will not mean an end to the long-term trend of rising temperatures as humans continue to burn planet-warming fossil fuels. “Although this sequence of excellent months will eventually be interrupted, the overall signature of climate change remains and there is no sign of a change in such a trend,” Buontempo said.
Guterres’ speech also referred to new data released by the World Meteorological Organization, which found an almost 86% chance that at least one of the years between 2024 and 2028 will break the record for the hottest year, set in 2023.
The WMO also calculated an almost 50% chance that average global temperatures over the entire five-year period between 2024 and 2028 would be more than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. That would bring the world closer to breaking the long-term 1.5 degree limit at the heart of the Paris Agreement.
Guterres laid the blame for the climate crisis firmly at the doorstep of fossil fuel companies that “make record profits and feed trillions in taxpayer subsidies,” he said.
These companies have spent billions of dollars over the years “distorting the truth, misleading the public and creating doubt,” he said. He called on all countries to ban fossil fuel advertisements, similar to advertising bans implemented around the world for other products that are harmful to human health, such as tobacco.
“We are in the presence of truth,” he said, adding that the battle for a living planet would be won or lost in this decade.
He called on world leaders to take immediate action, including massive cuts to planet-warming pollution and an immediate end to any new coal projects. It pushed rich countries to pledge to phase out coal by 2030, cut oil and gas by 60% by 2035 and increase the flow of funding to the poorest and most climate-vulnerable nations.
“We cannot accept a future where the rich are protected in air-conditioned bubbles, while the rest of humanity is plagued by deadly weather in unlivable lands,” Guterres said.
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