Why the global temperature records that keep falling one after the other are exceptional

On Monday, July 22, the global average temperature on the Earth’s surface reached 17.15°C, surpassing the record set the day before.

Two records in two days. According to provisional data from the European Earth Observatory Copernicus, our planet has experienced its two hottest days in its history. According to the observatory’s figures available on Wednesday, the average global temperature on the Earth’s surface rose to 17.15°C on Monday, July 22.

The day before, Copernicus showed that Sunday, July 21, with a global temperature of 17.09°C, had already set a record, beating that of July 6, 2023, at 17.08°C. Franceinfo explains why these records are extraordinary.

Because the records are getting closer and closer together

Copernicus stressed on Tuesday evening that the daily temperature record could be broken in the coming days. This was confirmed the following day. Such a pace is unusual. Before July 2023, the previous record for daily global average temperature had stood for seven years. It dated back to August 13, 2016, with 16.8°C. According to Copernicus data, this 2016 record has been broken on 57 days since July 3, 2023. No wonder: 2023 was the hottest year in history at the global level.

Previously, records could hold even longer: that of 16.58°C, established on August 6, 1998, was only beaten 17 years later, on August 2, 2015, to reach 16.60°C. A sign that warming is intensifying: the ten hottest days recorded on average worldwide over the last fifty years have all occurred since 2015.

“We are now in uncharted territory, and as the climate continues to warm, we are bound to see new records broken in the months and years to come.”warned the director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), Carlo Buontempo, on Sunday. The July 22 record is likely to be surpassed in the coming days, he said.

For science, the link between these heat records and global warming, caused by greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, is clearly established. “This is exactly what climate science predicted would happen in a situation where we continue to burn coal, oil and gas.”reacted Joyce Kimutai, a climatologist at Imperial College London, on Wednesday. “And it will continue to get worse until we stop burning fossil fuels and reach ‘net zero emissions’.”

Because the gaps are significant

The records of July 6, 2023 and July 21, 2024 are only played to a hundredth (17.08°C against 17.09°C). But that of July 22 is done with a “nice margin” compared to the previous one (+0.06°C), noted agroclimatologist Serge Zaka on X. “This ease in breaking records, whether global or local, is disconcerting”he also commented.

Record temperatures in 2023, the hottest year since records began, make the colors of the warming stripesthe colored bands illustrating global warming, reported franceinfo in January 2024. Indeed, the palette of reds is no longer sufficient to account for the phenomenon.

The temperature anomalies are so large that they are pushing us away from the Paris Agreement. Consider the global average temperature between July 2023 and June 2024. This is the highest on record, 0.76°C above the 1991-2020 average and 1.64°C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average. This exceeds the 1.5°C increase compared to the pre-industrial era, which is the most ambitious limit set by the Paris Agreement.

Because the series of heat records continues

The global temperature spike is (very) long. June 2024 was the hottest month ever recorded globally, setting a 13th consecutive monthly record. In detail, this month has an average temperature of 16.66°C on a global scale, “0.67°C higher than the 1991-2020 average for the month of June and 0.14°C higher than the previous record set in June 2023”Copernicus said.

Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, who works in Berkeley, USA, told the Guardian that these one-day records were “certainly worrying signs” following 13 consecutive months of record heat on a global scale. For Carlo Buontempo of Copernicus, this series is “particularly astonishing”.

According to the American agency Associated Press, scientists believe that it is “extraordinary” that such hot days occur two years in a row. Especially since the natural phenomenon El Niño, which tends to warm the planet, ended in the first part of 2024, and temperatures are not expected to be as high. Karsten Haustein, a climatologist at the University of Leipzig in Germany, told the British agency Reuters that it is remarkable that records continue to be broken when we are normally in a phase “neutral” between the end of El Niño and its cold counterpart, La Niña.

For Daniel Swain, a climatologist at the University of California, quoted by the Associated Press, this series of events and records is “another illustration of the extent of the warming of the Earth’s climate”. For his part, climatologist Peter Thorne, from the Irish University of Maynooth, judges in The Guardian that “We are completely unprepared for the extremes that this warmer world has imposed on us.”.