July 2024 was a tiny bit cooler than July 2023, but that’s not reassuring: according to Copernicus, the European climate change observatory, it is now “increasingly likely” that 2024 will be the hottest year on record.
The run of 13 consecutive monthly records for Earth’s surface heat “has ended, but only by a hair’s breadth,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy head of Copernicus’ Climate Change Service (C3S), in a statement.
Indeed, over the past month, marked by heat records in Greece and Japan and mercury exceeding 48°C in Morocco and causing 21 deaths in 24 hours, the average temperature on the surface of the globe was 16.91°C, only 0.04°C lower than the previous record of July 2023, indicates the monthly bulletin of Copernicus.
The heat was particularly high in the western United States and Canada, much of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, as well as eastern Antarctica, and Europe, which had its second warmest July on record, after July 2010.
“This end of the record monthly temperature streak is no cause for celebration,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. “Even without El Niño” – a natural phenomenon that induces global warming – “the world is still experiencing incredibly dangerous levels of heat,” she warned.
Globally, the month remains 1.48°C warmer than a typical July from 1850 to 1900, before humans began massively releasing greenhouse gases.
This is certainly a little less than the symbolic limit of 1.5°C, which had been exceeded every month for a year.
But July 2024 will remain the second warmest month on record, all seasons combined, Copernicus points out.
Series of disasters
And “the big picture has not changed: our climate continues to warm,” Burgess said. “The devastating impacts of climate change began well before 2023 and will continue until global greenhouse gas emissions reach net zero.”
“The world is getting too hot for us to cope with,” Celeste Saulo, vice-president of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), warned on Wednesday.
And indeed, July was not spared from the devastating consequences of climate change.
The month was marked by several heat waves, particularly in Central Europe and the Mediterranean. Record floods occurred in Pakistan and China, hurricanes such as Beryl hit the Caribbean and the United States, sometimes deadly landslides affected the state of Kerala in India, and megafires ravaged California.
In addition, the world broke the record for the hottest day ever recorded two days in a row in July, on July 22 and 23.
And the oceans, which absorb 90% of the excess heat generated by human activities, continue to overheat. Their average temperature in July was 20.88°C, the second highest monthly value for a July, only 0.01°C below the record set last year, after 15 consecutive monthly records.
Annual record ‘likely’
This remains worrying because one might have expected a more significant drop as the El Niño climate phenomenon, known to increase ocean temperatures, comes to an end.
Proof of this is that the mercury in the equatorial Pacific region, where El Niño is particularly pronounced, has begun to drop, “indicating the development of a La Niña,” the opposite version of this thermal oscillation phenomenon, which normally helps cool the planet.
Despite this development, many experts are already predicting that 2024 will be warmer than 2023, which was already a record year.
Since January, the global temperature is already 0.27 °C warmer than the same period in 2023, Copernicus points out. A sharp drop by the end of the year would be needed for 2024 to end below 2023.
But “this has rarely happened” since measurements began, “which makes it increasingly likely that 2024 will be the hottest year on record,” Copernicus concludes.