It was also the third consecutive month in which the Earth has exceeded the 1.5 degree Celsius limit established by the Paris Agreement.
June 2024 was the warmest month on record, the 13th consecutive month of record temperatures, according to the European climate service Copernicus.
It was also the 12th consecutive month in which the world warmed by 1.5 degrees Celsius. more than in pre-industrial times.
“It is a stark warning that we are approaching this very important limit established by the Paris Agreement“he said in an interview Nicolas Julien, chief climate scientist at Copernicus. “Global temperature continues to rise. He has done it at an accelerated pace“.
That temperature mark of 1.5 degrees Celsius is important because it is the heating limit which almost every country in the world agreed to in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, although Julien and other meteorologists have said the threshold will not be crossed until there is a long-term duration of widespread heat, as much as 20 or 30 years.
“This It’s more than a statistical oddity. and highlights a continuing change in our climate”,said the director of Copernicus, Carlo Buontempoit’s a statement.
Earth’s more than a year-long streak of record heat could soon come to an end, but not the climate chaos that has accompanied it, according to scientists.
How hot was it in June 2024?
According to Copernicus, the average temperature of the planet in June 2024 was 16.66 degrees Celsius, 0.67C above the average of the last 30 years.
It has broken the record for the hottest month of June, set a year earlier, at 0.14 ºC and It is the third warmest month on Copernicus recordswhich date back to 1940, only behind last July and August.
It’s not that records are being broken monthly, but that “have been shattered by very considerable margins in the last 13 months“Julien said.
“How bad is this?” asked the Texas A&M University climate scientist. Andrew Dessler, who was not involved in the report. “For the rich and for now, it is an expensive inconvenience. For the poor it is suffering. In the future, the amount of wealth you have to have to be simply an inconvenience will increase until most people suffer.”
What impact do high temperatures have on the global climate?
Even without reaching the long-term threshold of 1.5 degrees, “we have seen the consequences of climate change, these extreme weather events,” Julien said, namely worsening floods, storms, droughts and heat waves.
According to Copernicus, The June heat especially affected the southeast of Europa, Türkiyethe east of Canadathe west of USA y Mexico, Brazilthe north of Siberia, the Middle East, northern Africa and western Antarctica. Doctors had to treat thousands of heatstroke victims in Pakistan last monthwhen temperatures reached 47ºC.
June It was also the 15th consecutive month that the world’s oceans, more than two-thirds of the Earth’s surface, broke heat records, according to Copernicus data.
According to Julien and other meteorologists, most of this heat comes from heating long-term caused by greenhouse gases emitted by the combustion of coal, oil and natural gas. An overwhelming amount of the thermal energy trapped by human-caused climate change goes directly into the ocean, and those oceans take longer to warm up and cool down.
What paper does El Niño play?
The natural cycle of The boy y The girlwhich are warming and cooling of the central Pacific that changes weather around the world, also plays a role. The boy tends to trigger world temperature records.
Another factor is that the air over the Atlantic shipping channels is cleaner due to shipping regulations that reduce traditional air pollution particles, such as sulfur, which cause some cooling, according to scientists. That slightly masks the much larger warming effect of greenhouse gases.
According to Tianle Yuanclimatologist at NASA and the Baltimore campus of the University of Maryland who directed a study on the effects of maritime transport regulations, “that masking effect The rate of warming that already causes greenhouse gases was temporarily reduced and increased.
Will 2024 beat the heat record of 2023?
The climatologist Zeke Hausfatherfrom the technology company Stripes and the climate monitoring group Berkeley Earthstated in a post on becomes the warmest year since records of global surface temperature began in the mid-19th century.” Until now 2023 was the warmest year in history.
ADVERTISINGCopernicus has not yet calculated the odds of that happening, Julien said. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) last month awarded it a 50% chance.
What July awaits us?
Global daily average temperatures in late June and early July, while still warm, were not as warm as last year, Julien said.
“It is likely, I would say, that July 2024 be colder than July 2023 and this streak is over,” said Julien. “It’s still not certain. “Things can change.”
Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria, said data shows the Earth is on track for 3°C warming if emissions are not urgently reduced. And he feared that the end of the streak of months of record heat and the arrival of winter snows would make “people soon forget” about the danger.
“Our world is in crisis,” said Andrea Dutton, a climatologist at the University of Wisconsin. “Perhaps you are feeling that crisis today those who live in the trajectory of Beryl are experiencing a hurricane fueled by an extremely warm ocean which has given rise to a new era of tropical storms that can rapidly intensify in deadly major hurricanes and harmful”.
ADVERTISINGCopernicus uses billions of measurements from satellites, ships, planes and weather stations around the world and then reanalyses them with computer simulations. The scientific agencies of other countries, such as the NOAA and the NASAthey also perform monthly climate calculationsbut they take longer, go back further in time, and do not use computer simulations.
