“The Extreme Temperature Phenomena We Have Witnessed Will Only Intensify”

Record after record. And so it goes, year after year. This is how the monthly bulletins from the Copernicus Climate Change Service can be summarized. Historical records, according to their data, fall like dominoes. “The summer of 2022, the hottest since 1880”; “2023, the warmest summer of our lives”; and finally, 2024, “the hottest ever recorded globally and in Europe.”

And this is just the beginning, they assure us. “The extreme temperature phenomena we have witnessed this summer will only intensify unless we take urgent measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” warns Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).

With less than three months left in this year, 2024 has already entered historical records with the hottest day since data collection began. On July 22nd, a global average temperature of 17.15 degrees Celsius was reached, significantly surpassing the previous record from July 3rd, when for the first time the 17-degree barrier was broken by just a hundredth (17.01 degrees).

Additionally, the summer in the Northern Hemisphere was particularly warm in European territory. The June-August average of 2024 exceeded the historical figure recorded in the same period of 2022 by two-tenths. For the first time, the boreal summer in Europe surpassed 1.54 degrees compared to the average for the period 1991-2020. The global temperature record was also broken according to Copernicus figures. The figure is 0.69 degrees above the 1991-2020 average for those three months, thus surpassing the previous record of June-August 2023.

However, the summer of 2024 was “predominantly wetter than average in Western and Northern Europe,” explains the latest monthly bulletin from C3S. Despite this, most of the Mediterranean region and Eastern Europe recorded drier than average conditions throughout the season, in some cases associated with drought.

The team led by Carlo Buontempo warns that 2024 is on track to become the warmest year on record. “The average anomaly for the remaining months of this year would have to drop by at least 0.30 degrees for 2024 not to be warmer than 2023,” they calculate. “This has never happened in all ERA5 data sets, making it increasingly likely that 2024 will be the warmest year ever recorded,” they affirm.

August has once again been a scorching month in much of the planet. European temperatures were above average in Southern and Eastern Europe. This trend extends beyond the Old Continent and was particularly high in Eastern Antarctica, Texas, Mexico, Canada, Northeast Africa, Iran, China, Japan, and Australia. The month was more pleasant in Northwestern areas of Ireland and the United Kingdom, Iceland, Portugal's west coast, and Southern Norway.

But it's not just land that feels the heat; the sea suffers too. The average sea surface temperature (SST) for August 2024 between 60°S–60°N was 20.91 degrees Celsius—the second highest value recorded for that month and only 0.07 degrees below August 2023.

Each month, Copernicus Climate Change Service provides temperature data from Europe and other parts of the world. “We receive them from various points on the planet and our supercomputer processes them,” Carlo Buontempo tells this newspaper. This information comes from satellites, ships, or service stations.

Buontempo explains that these reanalysis data combine conventional weather observations and satellite data with a computer model of the Earth system to provide a comprehensive record and best estimate of global atmosphere, land surface, and ocean waves. “ERA5 also fills gaps where fewer observations are available worldwide,” he notes.