Driven by oceans that will not cool down, an unseasonably warm Antarctica and worsening climate change, earth's record hot streak has dialled up, making Sunday, then Monday, the hottest days humans have measured, according to the European climate service.
There was a good chance that data for Tuesday would make it three straight days of global record-breaking heat, said Carlo Buontempo, the director of the European climate service Copernicus.
“These peaks are not normally isolated,” he said.
Provisional satellite data published by Copernicus on Wednesday shows Monday was 0.06C hotter than Sunday, which was 0.01C hotter than the previous hottest day on record, July 6, 2023.
As well as the warmer oceans and Antarctica, the western United States and Canada and eastern Siberia were especially warm in the past few days, Buontempo said.
This is human-caused climate change in action, according to Buontempo and other scientists.
“The climate is generally warming up as a consequence of the increase in greenhouse gases,” he said.
Some scientists worry that human-caused climate change is accelerating.
Buontempo said the high temperatures in recent days were consistent with that idea but it was too soon to reach that conclusion.
“It may be the first sign of change in the rate of the temperature increase,” Buontempo said.
Other scientists do not see signs of acceleration.
The earth has set heat records for 13 straight months.
The global temperature averaged in the past year is more than 1.5C higher than pre-industrial times, seeming to exceed the global agreed upon limit for warming.
More than 1600 places across the globe tied or broke heat records in the past seven days, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Climate scientists say this could be the warmest it has been in 120,000 years because of human-caused climate change.
While scientists cannot be certain that Monday was the hottest day in that period, longer-term average temperatures have not been this high since long before humans developed agriculture.
“For most of the last 120,000 years, we were in an ice age and today is clearly warmer than that,” said Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler, adding that studies indicated we were in the hottest period in the past 10,000 years.
But it was still a difficult determination to make, said University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann, because data from tree rings, corals and ice cores did not go back that far.
“We are in an age where weather and climate records are frequently stretched beyond our tolerance levels, resulting in insurmountable loss of lives and livelihoods,” Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology.
“Deaths from high temperatures show how catastrophic it is not to take stronger action on cutting CO2”, Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald said in an email.
Copernicus’ preliminary data shows the global average temperature on Monday was 17.15C.
The previous record before this week was set just a year ago.
Before 2023, the previous recorded hottest day was in 2016, when average temperatures were at 16.8C.
While 2024 has been extremely warm, what kicked this week into new territory was an Antarctic winter with temperatures 6C to 10C warmer than normal, Buontempo said.
