June-August 2024 were hottest ever recorded: EU monitor

PARIS

The 2024 northern summer saw the highest global temperatures ever recorded, beating last year's record and making this year likely Earth's hottest ever, the EU's climate monitor said on Sept. 6.

The data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service followed a season of heatwaves around the world that scientists said were intensified by human-driven climate change.

"During the past three months of 2024, the globe has experienced the hottest June and August, the hottest day on record, and the hottest boreal summer on record," Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus, said in a report.

"This string of record temperatures is increasing the likelihood of 2024 being the hottest year on record."

The average global temperature at the Earth's surface was 16.82 celcius in August, according to Copernicus.

The June and August global temperature broke through the level of 1.5 celcius above the pre-industrial average, a key threshold for limiting the worst effects of climate change.

Heat was exacerbated in 2023 and early 2024 by the cyclical weather phenomenon El Nino, though Copernicus scientist Julien Nicolas told AFP its effects were not as strong as they sometimes are.

Meanwhile the contrary cyclical cooling phenomenon, known as La Nina, has not yet started, he said.

Against the global trend, regions such as Alaska, the eastern United States, parts of South America, Pakistan and the Sahel desert zone in northern Africa had lower than average temperatures in August, the report said.

But others such as Australia, where it was winter, parts of China, Japan and Spain experienced record warmth in August.

Globally, August 2024 matched that month's previous global temperature record from one year earlier, while this June was hotter than last, 

July was slightly hotter in 2023 than this year, but on average the three-month period broke the record in 2024.