Author: Seth Borenstein
WASHINGTON (AP) — Earth had its hottest day on record on Sunday, breaking another heat record set in past years, European climate service Copernicus said Tuesday.
Preliminary data from Copernicus showed that the global average temperature on Sunday was 17.09 degrees Celsius (62.76 degrees Fahrenheit), 0.01 degrees Celsius (0.02 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than last year's record set on July 6, 2023. Sunday's temperature record and last year's record erased the previous record of 16.8 degrees Celsius (62.24 degrees Fahrenheit) set in 2016, which itself was only a few years old.
Without human-caused climate change, records would be broken far less frequently, and new cold records would be set just as frequently as heat records.
“What is truly shocking is how different the temperatures over the past 13 months are from previous temperature records,” Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement. “We This is truly uncharted territory now, and as the climate continues to warm, we are sure to see new records being broken in the coming months and years.”
Copernicus said that while 2024 will be very warm, what entered new territory on Sunday was a warmer-than-usual Antarctic winter. The same thing happened on the southern continent when the record was set at the beginning of July last year.
But there was more than just warming in Antarctica on Sunday. Temperatures hit triple digits Fahrenheit across California's interior, compounding more than two dozen fires burning across the western United States. At the same time, Europe also experienced a deadly heat wave.
“After 13 consecutive record-breaking months, this is certainly a worrying sign,” said Berkeley Earth climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, who now estimates there is a 92% chance of 2024 Sex will surpass 2023 as the hottest year on record.
July is typically the hottest month of the year globally, mainly because there is more land in the Northern Hemisphere, so seasonal patterns there drive global temperatures.
Copernicus' records date back to 1940, but other global measurements by the US and British governments date back even further to 1880. The hottest spot on Earth has been around 120,000 years. It has now reached breakeven in the first six months of 2024.
Scientists blame climate change caused by the burning of coal, oil and gas, as well as livestock farming, for the high temperatures. Other factors include warming from the natural El Niño phenomenon in the central Pacific, which has now ended. Reduced ocean fuel pollution and possible undersea volcanic eruptions also contributed to some additional warmth, but these were not as important as greenhouse gases trapping heat, they said.
With El Niño likely to be replaced by a cooler La Niña soon, Hausfather said he would be surprised if 2024 sees more monthly records, but a hot start to the year could still be enough to keep the weather warmer than last year. warm.
Sure, Sunday's score is eye-catching, but “what really makes your eyeballs pop out,” said Victor Gensini, a climate scientist at Northern Illinois University who is not a member of the Copernicus team. “It’s that the temperatures over the past few years have been much higher than the previous scores. “This is definitely the fingerprint of climate change.”
Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said the differences between this year's high scores and last year's were so small and so preliminary that he was surprised by the publicity from European climate agencies.
“We really shouldn't compare absolute temperatures on individual days,” Mann said in an email.
Yes, it's a small difference, Gensini said in an interview, but there have been more than 30,500 days since Copernicus data began in 1940, and this was the hottest day of them all.
“That’s the important thing,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. “As long as we continue to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, climate warming will continue, and today we have the technology to basically stop doing that. What we lack is the political will.
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