The world is emerging from its warmest northern hemisphere summer since records began, the European Union’s climate change monitoring service said today, as global warming continues to intensify. The boreal summer of June to August this year blew past last summer to become the world’s warmest, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a monthly bulletin.
The exceptional heat increases the likelihood that 2024 will outrank 2023 as the planet’s warmest on record. “During the past three months of 2024, the globe has experienced the hottest June and August, the hottest day on record, and the hottest boreal summer on record,” said C3S deputy director Samantha Burgess. Unless countries urgently reduce their planet-heating emissions, extreme weather “will only become more intense”, she said.
Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are the main cause of climate change. The planet’s changed climate continued to fuel disasters this summer. In Sudan, flooding from heavy rains last month affected more than 300,000 people and brought cholera to the war-torn country. Elsewhere, scientists confirmed climate change is driving a severe ongoing drought on the Italian islands of Sicily and Sardinia, and it intensified Typhoon Gaemi, which tore through the Philippines, Taiwan and China in July, leaving more than 100 people dead.
Human-caused climate change and the El Nino natural weather phenomenon, which warms the surface waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean, both pushed temperatures to record highs earlier in the year. Copernicus said below-average temperatures in the equatorial Pacific last month indicated a shift to La Nina, which is El Nino’s cooler counterpart. But that didn’t prevent unusually high global sea surface temperatures worldwide, with average temperatures in August hotter than in the same month of any other year except for 2023. C3S’ dataset goes back to 1940, which the scientists cross-checked with other data to confirm that this summer was the hottest since the 1850 pre-industrial period.
And, August 2024 was the warmest August in Spain since records began according to State Meteorological Agency (AEMET) in 1961. With an average temperature of 25ºC, it surpassing the warmest August months to date, those of 2003 and 2023, both tied with 24.8ºC.
Moreover, last month was the 22nd wettest August since the beginning of the series in 1961 and the eighth of the 21st century. The average rainfall over Spain was 24.2 litres per square metre (l/m2), which represents 112% of the normal value for the month, taking as a reference period the period between 1991 and 2020.
According to the Ministry for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge (MITECO), these 25ºC are 2ºC above the average for August, taking as a reference period the period between 1991 and 2020. In the Balearics, the average temperature was 26.8ºC (eight tenths of a degree above normal), while in the Canary Islands it was 24ºC (new tenths of a degree above normal).
By days, MITECO has detailed that on 1 August the heat wave that had started on 23 July and had spread throughout the last week of July over mainland Spain and the Balearic Islands came to an end. In turn, between 4 and 12 August there was another heat wave in mainland Spain and the Balearic Islands with both maximum and minimum temperatures well above the usual values for the time of year. Temperatures exceeded 40 °C not only in the south and centre of the peninsula, but also in parts of the north.
