Driven by humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions, global temperature records have continued to fall for over a year: June 2024 became the hottest June ever recorded, erasing the record already broken in 2023.
With its procession of heat waves in Mexico, China and Saudi Arabia, June 2024 is the 13the consecutive month to set a record for an average temperature higher than equivalent months, the European Copernicus Observatory announced on Monday.
With this series, fueled by an unprecedented overheating of the oceans which have absorbed 90% of the excess heat caused by human activity, “the average global temperature over the last 12 months (July 2023 – June 2024) is the highest ever recorded”, according to Copernicus.
Over this period, the average temperature of the planet was “1.64°C above the pre-industrial average of 1850-1900”, when deforestation and the burning of coal, gas or oil had not yet warmed the Earth’s climate.
June 2024 is also “the 12the “This is a consecutive month that exceeds pre-industrial averages by 1.5°C,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus’ Climate Change Service (C3S), in a statement.
This 1.5°C threshold is the most ambitious objective of the 2015 Paris Agreement, signed by almost all countries. However, such an anomaly would have to be observed on average over several decades to consider that the climate has stabilised at +1.5°C.
If the current climate is already warmer by around 1.2°C compared to 1850-1900, the IPCC, a group of climate experts mandated by the UN, predicts that the 1.5°C threshold has a one in two chance of being reached on average by the years 2030-2035, at the current rate of emissions, the peak of which is expected by 2025.
1,300 dead in Mecca
In June, while the thermometer was close to or below seasonal norms (period 1991-2020) in France and Western Europe, a majority of humanity experienced higher, even exceptional, temperatures.
In Saudi Arabia, more than 1,300 people died during the pilgrimage to Mecca, where temperatures reached 51.8°C in the Grand Mosque of Islam’s holy city.
In Greece, the Acropolis had to be closed in mid-June, with temperatures of over 44°C. Northern China, including Beijing, was crushed by temperatures of over 40°C, while the south of the country suffered floods.
Kenya, Afghanistan and France have also experienced catastrophic flooding, another phenomenon accentuated worldwide by global warming, which increases the maximum humidity in the air and therefore the potential intensity of rainfall.
In the United States and Mexico, the deadly heat wave in late May and early June was made 35 times more likely by climate change, the leading scientific network World Weather Attribution (WWA) estimated.
On the fire front, June concluded in the Amazon, where a historic drought is raging, the worst first half of the year in 20 years and a “state of emergency” was declared in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil.
Power cuts
Another consequence of the heatwaves is that populations in the Balkans, Pakistan and Egypt have suffered from major power cuts, which have meant that essential fans, air conditioners and refrigerators have been shut down.
With the expected arrival by the end of the year of the cyclical climate phenomenon La Niña, synonymous with cooler global temperatures, “we can expect global temperatures to decrease in the coming months,” Julien Nicolas, a scientist at C3S, told AFP.
The global temperature at the end of 2024 will depend largely on the evolution of the heat of the oceans, which cover 70% of the planet and whose surface water temperature has remained well above all records for more than a year.
The exceptional heat on the surface of the North Atlantic has thus reinforced the power of Berylan exceptional hurricane which devastated the Antilles at the beginning of July.
“If these record temperatures persist, despite a development of La Niña, 2024 could be warmer than 2023,” the hottest year ever measured, “but it is too early to say,” according to Julien Nicolas.