NY.- The more than year-long streak of record-breaking warm months on Earth continued to extend into June, according to the European climate change service Copernicus.
There is hope that the planet will soon see an end to record-breaking heat waves, but not to the climate chaos that accompanies them, scientists said.
Global temperatures in June were record hot for the 13th consecutive month and marked the 12th month in a row that the world was 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times, Copernicus said in an announcement released early Monday.
“It is a stark warning that we are approaching this extremely important limit set out in the Paris Agreement,” Nicolas Julien, a senior climatologist at Copernicus, said in an interview. “Global temperatures are still increasing. The pace is rapid.”
That 1.5-degree temperature mark is important because that is the warming limit agreed to by nearly all of the world’s countries in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, though Julien and other meteorologists have said the threshold won’t be crossed until the duration of prolonged heat becomes long-term — 20 or 30 years from now.
“This is more than a statistical rarity and highlights a continuing change in our climate,” Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement.
In June 2024, the global temperature averaged 16.66 degrees Celsius (62 degrees Fahrenheit), which is 0.67 Celsius (1.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 30-year average for that month, according to Copernicus. It broke the record for the warmest June, set a year earlier, by 0.14 degrees Celsius (a quarter of a degree Fahrenheit) and is the third-warmest of any month on record in Copernicus records, which go back to 1940, behind only last July and last August.
It’s not that records are being broken on a monthly basis, but rather that they are being “surpassed by very substantial margins over the past 13 months,” Julien stressed.
“How bad is this?” asked Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler, who was not part of the report. “For the rich, for now, it’s a costly inconvenience. For the poor, it’s suffering. In the future, the amount of wealth you have to have to just suffer inconvenience will increase until most people suffer.”
Even without reaching the 1.5 degree threshold in the long term, “we have seen the consequences of climate change, these extreme weather events,” Julien said, meaning worsening floods, storms, droughts and heat waves.
According to Copernicus, June’s heat was hardest in southeastern Europe, Turkey, eastern Canada, the western United States and Mexico, Brazil, northern Siberia, the Middle East, northern Africa and western Antarctica. Doctors had to treat thousands of heatstroke victims in Pakistan last month when temperatures reached 47 degrees Celsius (117 Fahrenheit).
June was also the 15th consecutive month that the world’s oceans – more than two-thirds of the Earth’s surface – broke heat records, Copernicus data revealed.
Most of this heat comes from long-term warming from greenhouse gases emitted by burning coal, oil and natural gas, Julien and other meteorologists agreed. An overwhelming amount of the heat energy trapped by man-made climate change goes straight into the ocean, and those oceans take longer to warm and cool.
The natural cycle of El Niño and La Niña, the warming and cooling of the central Pacific that changes the climate around the world, also plays a role. El Niño tends to set global temperature records, and the strong El Niño that formed last year ended in June.
Another factor is that the air over Atlantic shipping channels is cleaner because of shipping regulations that reduce traditional air pollution particles, such as sulfur, that cause some cooling, the scientists explained. This slightly masks the much larger warming effect of greenhouse gases. That “masking effect became smaller and will temporarily increase the rate of warming” already caused by greenhouse gases, said Tianle Yuan, a climate scientist at NASA and the University of Maryland’s Baltimore campus who led a study on the effects of shipping regulations.
“Our world is in crisis,” said Andrea Dutton, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin. “You may be feeling that crisis today — those living in Beryl’s path are experiencing a hurricane driven by an extremely warm ocean that has given rise to a new era of tropical storms that can rapidly intensify into powerful, deadly and costly hurricanes. Even if you’re not dealing with that crisis today, every temperature record we set means that climate change is more likely to bring the crisis to your doorstep or the doorstep of your loved ones.”
Copernicus uses billions of measurements from satellites, ships, planes and weather stations around the world and then reanalyzes them with computer simulations. Scientific agencies in several other countries, including NOAA and NASA, also make monthly climate calculations, but they take longer, go back further in time and do not use computer simulations.
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