This is the hottest summer ever recorded in the Northern Hemisphere, scientists say
Earth is sweltering through its hottest Northern Hemisphere summer ever measured, with a record August capping a season of brutal and deadly temperatures, according to the World Meteorological Organization.
Last month was not only the hottest August scientists ever recorded with modern equipment; it was also the second-hottest month, behind July, the WMO and the European climate service Copernicus announced Wednesday.
August was about 2.7 degrees warmer than preindustrial averages. That is the threshold that the world is trying not to pass, though scientists are more concerned about rises in temperatures over decades, not merely a spike over a month’s time.
The world’s oceans — more than 70% of the Earth’s surface — were the hottest ever recorded, nearly 70 degrees, and have set high-temperature marks for three consecutive months, the WMO and Copernicus said.
“The dog days of summer are not just barking, they are biting,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement. “Climate breakdown has begun.”
So far, 2023 is the second-hottest year on record, behind 2016, according to Copernicus.
More than 6.5 billion people — 81% of the global population — experienced climate change-attributed heat in July 2023, according to a new report from Climate Central.
Scientists blame human-caused climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, with an extra push from a natural El Niño, a temporary warming of parts of the Pacific Ocean that changes weather worldwide. Usually an El Niño, which started earlier this year, adds extra heat to global temperatures, but more so in its second year.
Climatologist Andrew Weaver said the numbers announced by WMO and Copernicus come as no surprise. He lamented that governments have not appeared to take the issue of global heating seriously enough, and expressed concern that the public will forget the issue when temperatures fall again.
“It’s time for global leaders to start telling the truth,” said Weaver, a professor at the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria in Canada.
He warned that the world would not meet the agreed-upon goal of limiting heating to 2.7 degrees; instead, it’s “all hands on deck now” to prevent it from reaching twice that — “a level of warming that will wreak havoc worldwide.”
As summer temperatures soar, supplying electricity has become an intractable problem for countries like Iraq and Iran, where people sweat and stew.
Copernicus, a division of the European Union’s space program, has records going back to 1940. But in Britain and the United States, global records go back to the mid-1800s, and the two countries’ weather and science agencies are expected to concur that this summer has been a record breaker.
“What we are observing — not only new extremes but the persistence of these record-breaking conditions, and the impacts these have on both people and planet — are a clear consequence of the warming of the climate system,” Copernicus Climate Change Service Director Carlo Buontempo said.
Scientists have used tree rings, ice cores and other proxies to estimate that temperatures are now warmer than they have been in about 120,000 years. The world has been warmer before, but that was prior to human civilization.
So far, daily September temperatures are higher than what has been recorded before, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer.
Experts are warning that rice production across South and Southeast Asia is likely to suffer with the world heading into an El Niño weather pattern.
While the world’s air and oceans are setting records for heat, Antarctica continues to set records for low amounts of sea ice, the WMO said.
“Antarctic sea ice extent was literally off the charts, and the global sea surface temperature was once again at a new record,” the WMO’s secretary-general, Petteri Taalas, said in a statement. “It is worth noting that this is happening BEFORE we see the full warming impact of the El Niño event, which typically plays out in the second year after it develops.”
A strong El Niño coincided with the all-time high temperatures in 2016. The U.N. weather agency earlier this year rolled out predictions that suggest Earth would within the next five years have a year that averages 2.7 degrees warmer than in the mid-19th century. Each year at or near that increased level matters.
It also predicted a 98% chance of breaking the 2016 record between now and 2027.
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The new readings on high global temperatures came as the WMO released its latest bulletin on air quality and climate Wednesday, noting that extreme heat, compounded by wildfires and desert dust, has had a measurable effect on air quality, human health and the environment.
WMO scientific advisor Lorenzo Labrador lamented the deteriorating air quality around the globe and cited a “record-breaking wildfire season” in many parts of the world, including western Canada and Europe.
“If heat waves increase as a result of El Niño, we may probably expect a further degradation in air quality as a whole,” he said.
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