According to the EU Earth Observation Program Copernicus, the recently ended June was the hottest worldwide since temperature records began, breaking the previous year’s record. Since June 2023, each month has set a new temperature record, as reported by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) on Monday. “This is more than just a statistical oddity, and it illustrates the major and ongoing change in our climate,” explained C3S Director Carlo Buontempo.
As long as humanity continues to produce greenhouse gases, further temperature extremes are inevitable, Buontempo emphasized. According to Copernicus, the global average temperature over the past twelve months was 1.64 degrees Celsius above that of the pre-industrial era. June 2024 was also the twelfth consecutive month to exceed the pre-industrial average by 1.5 degrees.
El Niño Contributes to High Temperatures
The El Niño weather phenomenon, which leads to warming of the sea surface in the southern Pacific, has been contributing to the current high temperatures since June 2023. However, according to Copernicus scientist Julien Nicolas, El Niño alone cannot explain the record temperature values of recent months.
In the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, the international community agreed to limit global warming to well below two degrees, preferably to 1.5 degrees compared to the pre-industrial era. This refers to the average value over a period of several decades. Given progressive global warming, this goal is becoming increasingly out of reach, and a permanent exceedance of the 1.5-degree limit seems foreseeable.
In June 2024, the European average temperature exceeded the average for June months from 1991 to 2020 by 1.57 degrees. This made June 2024 the second-warmest June in Europe since records began. It was particularly hot in the southeast of the continent and Turkey, while temperatures in Western Europe, Iceland, and northwestern Russia were near or below average.
Outside Europe, temperatures were above average in eastern Canada, the western United States and Mexico, Brazil, northern Siberia, the Middle East, North Africa, and western Antarctica.