The European Union climate monitoring agency, Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), released preliminary data on Tuesday, July 23rd, indicating that last Sunday, July 21st, the Earth reached the hottest temperature ever recorded in human history. This marks another record-breaking high temperature surpassed in recent years.
According to reports from the Associated Press, data showed that the global average temperature on Sunday was 17.09 degrees Celsius (62.76 degrees Fahrenheit), surpassing the previous record set on July 6th last year (2023) by 0.01 degrees Celsius (0.02 degrees Fahrenheit). Both Sunday’s record and last year’s record have broken the previous highest record of 16.8 degrees Celsius (62.24 degrees Fahrenheit) set in 2016.
Carlo Buontempo, the director of the Copernicus Institute, stated in a release, “What is truly shocking is the significant difference in temperatures over the past 13 months compared to previous temperature records.”
“We are now in uncharted territory, as the climate continues to warm, we will inevitably see new high-temperature records in the coming months or years.”
The research institute also mentioned that while 2024 has been exceptionally warm, it was a particularly hotter than usual winter in the Antarctic that pushed Sunday’s temperatures to new heights. A similar situation occurred last year when the record was set in early July.
However, Sunday was not only about the warming of Antarctica. Inland areas of California were baked under triple-digit temperatures, exacerbating over twenty wildfires in the western United States. Meanwhile, the European continent was also enduring deadly heatwaves.
Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Berkeley Earth, said, “After breaking records for 13 consecutive months, this is indeed a concerning sign.”
With the possibility of the El Niño phenomenon being replaced soon by the cooling La Niña phenomenon, Hausfather stated that if monthly records were to be broken in 2024 again, he would be surprised. However, the high temperatures earlier this year may still be enough to keep the average temperature above last year.
He now estimates a 92% probability that 2024 will surpass 2023 and become the hottest year on record. July is typically the hottest month globally, mainly due to the abundance of land in the Northern Hemisphere, which elevates global temperatures through seasonal patterns.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service’s records can be traced back to as early as 1940, but global measurements by countries like the US and UK date back even further to 1880. Many scientists study these records along with tree rings and ice cores, indicating that last year was the hottest year on Earth in approximately 120,000 years. Now, the first six months of 2024 have even broken that record.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service is part of the European Union’s space program. Managed by the European Commission, the program is implemented in cooperation with member states, the European Space Agency (ESA), the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), and other partners to provide information services through a wealth of global data obtained from satellite, ground-based, airborne, and maritime measurement systems.