The European Union’s climate change observation agency, Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), has recently reported that the hottest summer ever recorded in the northern hemisphere, has just ended. This record-breaking boreal summer, June to August, outpaced the previous year’s temperatures, marking it as the warmest in recorded history, according to the monthly C3S bulletin.
This unusual spike in heat implies that 2024 has a significant chance to surpass 2023 and become the earth’s hottest year to date. Samantha Burgess, the deputy director of C3S, stated, “The globe has encountered its hottest June and August, the warmest day ever noted, and the hottest boreal summer on record in the last quarter of 2024.”
Burgess emphasised the dire need for countries to aggressively slash their globe-heating emissions; otherwise, she warned, these already extreme weather incidents would escalate in intensity. Fossil fuel emissions, releasing greenhouse gases, are recognised as the primary culprits of the ongoing climate alterations.
This summer has seen a further range of catastrophic events instigated by the changing climate. Over 300,000 people have been afflicted by flooding caused by intense rains in Sudan, leading to the spread of cholera in the conflict-stricken nation. Scientists have ascertained that climate change has intensified an extreme drought on Sicily and Sardinia, the Italian islands and amplified the damaging effects of Typhoon Gaemi, leaving over 100 dead in its wake in China, Taiwan and the Philippines.
The record high temperatures that arose earlier in the year can be attributed to the combined effects of human-induced climate change and the El Niño weather phenomenon, which warms the surface waters of the eastern Pacific Ocean. Despite the presence of La Niña, the cooler contrast to El Niño, denoted by sub-par temperatures in the equatorial Pacific last month, the global sea surface temperatures remained unexpectedly high. August’s average temperatures were only outdone by those recorded in 2023.
Copernicus’s data, dating back to 1940, was cross-referenced with additional information to confirm that this was indeed the hottest summer since the pre-industrial period in 1850, thus emphasising the severity of the ongoing climate crisis.