New Delhi:

The Earth experienced its hottest day in at least 84 years, with the global average temperature reaching a record high of 17.09 degrees Celsius on July 21, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).

This follows a series of record-breaking temperatures — June marked the 12th consecutive month of global temperatures reaching or exceeding the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold. Every month since June last year has been the warmest on record.

Preliminary data from C3S showed that July 21 was the hottest day since at least 1940, surpassing the previous record of 17.08 degrees Celsius set on July 6, 2023.

What stands out is the significant difference between the temperatures since July 2023 and all previous years.

Before July 2023, the Earth’s daily average temperature record, set in August 2016, was 16.8 degrees Celsius. However, since July 3, 2023, there have been 57 days with temperatures exceeding that previous record.

Carlo Buontempo, director of C3S, said the difference between the temperatures over the past 13 months and previous records is staggering.

“We are now in truly uncharted territory and as the climate continues to warm, we are bound to see new records in the coming months and years,” he said.

Analysis shows that 2023 and 2024 have seen significantly higher annual maximum daily global temperatures compared to previous years. The 10 years with the highest daily average temperatures are from 2015 to 2024.

The global average temperature usually peaks between late June and early August, driven by the northern hemisphere’s summer. The land masses in the northern hemisphere warm up faster than the southern hemisphere’s oceans can cool down.

With global average temperatures already at near-record levels, a new daily average temperature record was not completely unexpected.

C3S scientists attributed the sudden rise in daily global temperatures to much higher-than-average temperatures over large parts of Antarctica. Such large anomalies are not uncommon during the Antarctic winter and also contributed to record global temperatures in early July 2023.

The Antarctic Sea ice extent is almost as low as it was last year, leading to above-average temperatures over parts of the Southern Ocean.

As the global average temperature typically peaks between late June and early August, scientists expect it to rise and peak around July 22 or 23, 2024, before decreasing.

The European climate agency said whether 2024 will be the warmest year ever depends largely on the development and intensity of La Niña. While 2024 has been warm enough to surpass 2023, the exceptional warmth of the last four months of 2023 makes it too early to predict with certainty which year will be warmer.

Climate science non-profit Berkeley Earth estimated last week that 2024 has a 92 per cent chance of setting a new annual heat record.

There is a 99 per cent chance that 2024 will have an annual average temperature anomaly of more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 average, it said.

At the 2015 UN climate talks in Paris, world leaders committed to limiting the global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial period average to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. However, a permanent breach of the 1.5-degree Celsius limit specified in the Paris Agreement refers to long-term warming over a 20 or 30-year period.

The Earth’s global surface temperature has already increased by around 1.2 degrees Celsius due to the rapidly-increasing concentration of greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide and methane, in the atmosphere. This warming is considered to be the reason behind record droughts, wildfires and floods worldwide. PTI GVS RC

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

According to a recent research, the summer months in 2023 were on average 2.2 C (4 F) warmer than the estimated average temperature across the years 1 to 1890.
| Photo Credit: The Hindu

The intense northern hemisphere summer heat that drove wildfires across the Mediterranean, buckled roads in Texas and strained power grids in China last year made it not just the warmest summer on record – but the warmest in some 2,000 years, new research suggests.

The stark finding comes from one of two new studies released on Tuesday, as both global temperatures and climate-warming emissions continue to climb.

Scientists had quickly declared last year’s June to August period as the warmest since record-keeping began in the 1940s.

New work published in the journal Nature suggests the 2023 heat eclipsed temperatures over a far longer timeline – a finding established by looking at meteorological records dating to the mid-1800s and temperature data based on the analysis of tree rings across nine northern sites.

“When you look at the long sweep of history, you can see just how dramatic recent global warming is,” said study co-author Jan Esper, a climate scientist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany.

Last year’s summer season temperatures on lands between 30 and 90 degrees north latitude reached 2.07 degrees Celsius (3.73 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than pre-industrial averages, the study said.

Based on tree ring data, the summer months in 2023 were on average 2.2 C (4 F) warmer than the estimated average temperature across the years 1 to 1890.

The finding was not entirely a surprise. By January, scientists with the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service were saying the year of 2023 was “very likely” to have been the warmest in some 100,000 years.

However, proving such a long record is unlikely, Esper said. He and two other European scientists argued in a paper last year that year-by-year comparisons could not be established over such a vast time scale with current scientific methods, including gleaning temperature data from sources such as marine sediments or peat bogs.

“We don’t have such data,” Esper said. “That was an overstatement.”

Last year’s intense summer heat was amplified by the El Nino climate pattern, which typically coincides with warmer global temperatures, leading to “longer and more severe heatwaves, and extended periods of drought,” Esper said.

Heatwaves are already taking a toll on people’s health, with more than 150,000 deaths in 43 countries linked to heatwaves for each year between 1990 and 2019, according to the details of a second study published on Tuesday in the journal PLOS Medicine.

That would account for about 1% of global deaths – roughly the same toll taken by the global COVID-19 pandemic.

More than half of those heatwave-related excess deaths occurred in populous Asia.

When the data are adjusted for population size, Europe had the highest per capita toll with an average of 655 heat-related deaths each year per 10 million residents. Within the region, Greece, Malta, and Italy registered the highest excess deaths.

Extreme heat can trigger heart problems and breathing difficulty or cause heat stroke.