Monday was recorded as the hottest day ever globally — beating a record set the day before — as countries around the world, from Japan to Bolivia to the United States, continue to feel the heat, according to the European climate change service.
Provisional satellite data published by the Copernicus climate research program on Wednesday showed that Monday broke the previous day’s record by 0.06 C (0.1 F).
Climate scientists say it’s plausible that this is the warmest it has been in 120,000 years because of human-caused climate change. While scientists cannot be certain that Monday was the very hottest day throughout that period, average temperatures have not been this high since long before humans developed agriculture.
But it’s a difficult determination to make, said University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann, because data from tree rings, corals and ice cores don’t go that far back globally.
Canada has used rapid analysis for the first time to determine a link between climate change and June’s record-breaking heat wave in Quebec, Ontario and Atlantic Canada.
The temperature rise in recent decades is in line with what climate scientists projected would happen if humans kept burning fossil fuels at an increasing rate.
“We are in an age where weather and climate records are frequently stretched beyond our tolerance levels, resulting in insurmountable loss of lives and livelihoods,” said Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology.
“Deaths from high temperatures show how catastrophic it is not to take stronger action on cutting CO2,” which is the main heat-trapping gas, Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald said in an email.
The preliminary data from Copernicus shows the global average temperature on July 22 was 17.15 C (62.87 F). The previous record before this week was set just a year ago. Before last year, the previous recorded hottest day was in 2016 when average temperatures were at 16.8 C (62.24 F).
Scientists said it was “extraordinary” that such warm days have now occurred in two consecutive years especially when the natural El Niño warming of the central Pacific Ocean ended earlier this year.
“This is yet another illustration of just how much the Earth’s climate has warmed,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
While 2024 has been extremely warm, what kicked this week into new territory was a warmer-than-usual Antarctic winter, according to Copernicus. The same thing happened on the southern continent last year when the record was set in early July.
The European Union’s Copernicus climate change monitoring service says the global average temperature for the last 12 months was the highest on record. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called on world leaders and corporations to take ‘urgent action.’
Copernicus records go back to 1940, but other global measurements by the United States and United Kingdom governments go back even further, to 1880. Many scientists, considering those records alongside information from tree rings and ice cores, say last year’s record highs were the hottest the planet has been in about 120,000 years.
Now the first six months of 2024 have broken even those.
Without human-caused climate change, scientists say that extreme temperature records would not be broken nearly as frequently as is happening in recent years.
Christiana Figueres, the former head of UN climate negotiations, said “we all scorch and fry” if the world doesn’t immediately change course, “but targeted national policies have to enable that transformation.”