For months, the planet has been warmer than ever before measured. EU climate agency Copernicus says if countries keep pumping out greenhouse gases, sweltering temperatures will remain a fact of the future.
By Cain Burdeau
The planet’s run of record-breaking heat stretched to 13 months in June as the world continued to swelter in the above-average temperatures that scientists warn will become a dangerous normal in the coming years, the European Union’s climate change monitor reported Monday.
Globally, last month was the warmest June ever measured at 0.67 degrees Celsius (1.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above average, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service. This June was slightly warmer than last June, the previous record, the agency said.
Each month for the past 13 months has been the warmest on record. Last year was the warmest year on record and 2024 may wind up even hotter.
This intense heat stretch also has brought the planet’s temperature to a point where it has been 1.5 C (2.25 F) warmer than pre-industrial conditions for the past 12 months, Copernicus said.
The agency calculated the average temperature over the past 12 months as 1.64 C (2.95 F) above the pre-industrial average. Scientists use temperatures taken between 1850 and 1900 as a basis for determining what conditions were like before the advent of industrialization and the burning of massive amounts of fossil fuels.
Breaching the 1.5 C mark is significant because governments pledged to keep global warming from exceeding that threshold when they signed the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Scientists warn the planet faces irreversible damage if global temperatures surpass that point for long periods of 20 or 30 years. Many scientists doubt it will be possible to keep warming under 1.5 C due to the sheer amount of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, while more are continuously pumped in. Last year, record levels of carbon emissions were added to the atmosphere, according to the Global Carbon Project.
This current record stretch of heat is considered a foretaste of how the future climate could feel — and the dangers that come with a warmer planet have been made painfully clear over the past year with extreme heat, wildfires and drought battering many regions of the world.
Carl Buontempo, the Copernicus director, said it is “inevitable” that the planet will continue to warm and set new heat records as long as the load of carbon emissions entering the atmosphere isn’t reduced.
“Even if this specific streak of extremes ends at some point, we are bound to see new records being broken as the climate continues to warm,” he said. “This is more than a statistical oddity and it highlights a large and continuing shift in our climate.”
June was particularly hot in the Middle East, southern Europe, northern Africa, eastern Canada, the western United States and Mexico, Brazil, northern Siberia and western Antarctica, Copernicus said.
Extreme heat in the Middle East led to the deaths of about 1,300 people during this year’s Hajj, the annual pilgrimage Muslims make to Mecca. The timing of the pilgrimage is determined by the lunar Islamic calendar and it fell again this year during the torpid Saudi summer. Saudi Arabia’s national meteorological center reported a high of 125 F at the Grand Mosque in Mecca in June.
Southern Europe was struck by intense heat waves in June too. In Greece, extreme heat prompted the closing of the ancient Acropolis and caused several deaths of tourists as temperatures soared to 109 F in the middle of the month. Major blackouts occurred in Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina and along Croatia’s Adriatic coast on June 20 as power grids were overwhelmed during a heat wave in the Balkan region.
Besides human-caused global warming, the emergence of an El Niño weather pattern during the spring of 2023 has fed this stretch of heat. El Niños bring warmer temperatures but also unruly weather, including intense storms and heavy rainfall. In June, parts of Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland experienced flooding.
The World Meteorological Organization says this El Niño phase is ending and that it will likely be replaced by the milder La Niña pattern later this year.
There are signs that La Niña is developing already with temperatures in June coming in below average in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, the site where this global weather phenomenon takes place.
Copernicus said the planet experienced a similar monthslong heat spell between 2015 and 2016 during a previous El Niño phase.
Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.
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SEE ALSO: In a troubling milestone, Earth surpasses 1.5 degrees C of warming for 12 consecutive months, from the LA Times
