The European Union’s climate change monitoring service said on Monday that last month was the hottest June ever recorded, continuing a streak of extraordinary temperatures that has led some scientists to say 2024 will be the world’s hottest year.
The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a monthly bulletin that every month from June 2023 – 13 months in a row – will be the planet’s hottest month since records began, compared to the same month in previous years.
According to some scientists, the latest data suggests that 2024 could be a hotter year than 2023, with temperatures reaching record highs so far due to human-caused climate change and the El Niño natural weather phenomenon.
“I now estimate that there is about a 95% chance that 2024 will surpass 2023 to be the hottest year since global surface temperature records began in the mid-1800s,” said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, a US nonprofit.
The changing climate will have caused devastating consequences worldwide in 2024.
Last month, more than 1,000 people died from extreme heat during the Hajj pilgrimage. Heat-related deaths were also reported in New Delhi, which experienced an unprecedentedly long heatwave, and among tourists in Greece.
Friedrich Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute, said it was “very likely” that 2024 would be the hottest year ever recorded.
“El Nino is a naturally occurring phenomenon that will come and go. We can’t stop El Nino, but we can stop burning oil, gas and coal,” he said.
The natural El Niño event, which warms surface waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean, raises the global average temperature.
This effect has diminished in recent months, and the world is now in a neutral state ahead of cooler La Niña conditions developing later this year.
The C3S dataset goes back to 1940, which scientists checked with other data to confirm that last month was the warmest June since the pre-industrial era of 1850-1900.
Greenhouse gas emissions produced by the burning of fossil fuels are the main cause of climate change.
Despite promises to curb global warming, countries have so far collectively failed to reduce these emissions, causing temperatures to rise steadily for decades.
C3S said the global average temperature in the 12 months ending in June was the highest for any such period, 1.64 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average.
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