Monday marked the hottest day on record globally, breaking the record set the day before, as countries around the world from Japan to Bolivia to the United States continued to feel the heat, according to the European Climate Change Service.
Provisional satellite data released by Copernicus on Wednesday showed that Monday broke the previous day’s record by 0.06 degrees Celsius (°C).
Climatologists say the planet is as warm today as it was 125,000 years ago, due to human-induced climate change. While scientists can’t be certain that Monday was the warmest day in that period, average temperatures haven’t been this high since before humans developed agriculture.
The temperature increase in recent decades is consistent with what climate scientists predicted if humans continued to burn fossil fuels at an increasing rate.
“We live in an era where weather and climate records often exceed our tolerance thresholds, leading to insurmountable losses in lives and livelihoods,” said Roxy Mathew Koll, a climatologist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology.
Preliminary data from Copernicus shows that the global average temperature on Monday was 17.15°C. The previous record, before this week, was set just a year ago. Before last year, the previous warmest day on record was in 2016, when average temperatures were 16.8°C.
While 2024 was extremely warm, it was a warmer-than-usual Antarctic winter that tipped the scales this week, according to Copernicus. The same thing happened on the southern continent last year when the record was set in early July.
Copernicus’s records date back to 1940, but other global measurements by the US and UK governments go back even further, to 1880. Many scientists, taking into account these data along with tree rings and ice caps, say last year’s records were the warmest the planet has seen in about 120,000 years. Now, the first six months of 2024 have surpassed those.
Without human-caused climate change, scientists say records for extreme temperatures would not be broken as frequently as in recent years.
Former UN climate negotiator Christiana Figueres said that “we will all burn” if the world does not change course immediately, “but targeted national policies must enable this transformation.”
Scientists said it was “extraordinary” that such warm days were now occurring two years in a row, especially when the natural El Niño warming of the central Pacific Ocean ended earlier this year. “This is another illustration of how much the Earth is warming,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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