The European Union’s climate monitor says Monday was the world’s hottest day on record after it inched past Sunday’s high as swaths of Europe, Asia and North America experienced blistering temperatures.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said on Wednesday that the global average surface air temperature on July 22 rose to 17.15 degrees Celsius (62.9 degrees Fahrenheit) – or 0.06 degrees Celsius higher than the record set just a day earlier.
C3S has been tracking such patterns since 1940.
“This is exactly what climate science told us would happen if the world continued burning coal, oil and gas,” Joyce Kimutai, a climate scientist from Imperial College London, told the AFP news agency.
“And it will continue getting hotter until we stop burning fossil fuels and reach net zero emissions.”
The record had last been set for four consecutive days in early July 2023. Before that, the hottest day was in August 2016.
In recent days, cities in Japan, Indonesia and China have registered record heat.
Gulf countries have also experienced high temperatures that exceed 60C (140F) when factoring in humidity while some European countries saw temperatures surge to 45C (113F).
As the effects of climate change intensify, weather patterns are becoming more extreme with heatwaves, droughts, ramped-up storms and floods affecting much of the globe.
The rise in temperatures comes after Europe experienced a severe heatwave last year that led to intense wildfires due to an El Nino weather pattern, which warms the Pacific Ocean.
Climate scientist Karsten Haustein at Leipzig University in Germany told the Reuters news agency that Monday’s temperatures “might have set a new global record for warmest absolute global average temperature ever”.
“By that I mean going back tens of thousands of years.”
Haustein called it “remarkable” that the record had been breached with the world no longer feeling the effects of El Nino.
Every month since June 2023 has eclipsed its own temperature record compared with the same month in previous years, an unprecedented 13-month streak that C3S Director Carlo Buontempo on Tuesday called “truly staggering”.
