The European meteorological agency Copernicus said on Wednesday that a 13-month streak of new records for global average temperatures came to an end in July this year as the natural El Niño weather pattern weakened.
But average temperatures in July 2024 will be just slightly warmer than last July, and scientists said the end of the record-breaking streak would not change the threat posed by the climate crisis.
“The overall situation remains unchanged,” Copernicus deputy director Samantha Burgess said in a statement. “The climate continues to warm.”
Human-caused climate change is driving extreme weather events that are wreaking havoc around the world, with several examples in the past few weeks alone: Torrential rains, strong winds and flooding forced thousands to evacuate Cape Town, South Africa; deadly landslides occurred on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi; Beryl became the fastest Category 4 hurricane on record, leaving a path of massive destruction in its wake; and Japanese authorities announced that more than 120 people were killed in Tokyo due to record heat waves.
The heat was especially unrelenting.
According to Copernicus, the global average temperature for July 2024 was 62.4°C (16.91°F), 1.2°C (0.68°F) warmer than the 30-year average for this month. Temperatures were slightly cooler than the same period last year.
It was the second-warmest July on record for the agency, behind only July 2023. The planet also experienced its two hottest days on record, on July 22 and July 23, with average temperatures of about 62.9 degrees, respectively.
According to the Copernicus measurements, global temperatures in July were 2.7 degrees Celsius (1.48 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than before the industrial revolution, close to the 1.5-degree limit on temperature rise agreed to by nearly all countries in the world in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
Julian Nicolas, a senior climate scientist at Copernicus, said the El Niño weather phenomenon (which naturally warms the Pacific Ocean and changes weather around the world) caused 13 months of record heat. Temperatures dropped slightly in July as the El Niño phenomenon has ended. A La Niña event (a natural cooling) is not expected until later this year.
However, the overall trend is still towards warming.
“The world situation is not all that different from a year ago,” Nicholas said in an interview.
“The fact that global sea surface temperatures have been at or near record levels for over a year now is an important contributing factor,” he said. “The main driving force behind these record temperatures is also the long-term warming trend that is directly linked to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
This includes carbon dioxide, which is produced from burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas.
July’s temperatures hit some parts of the country especially hard, including western Canada and the western United States, where temperatures were scorching hot and at one point put about a third of the U.S. population under dangerous, record-breaking heat warnings.
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In Southern and Eastern Europe, the Italian Health Ministry issued the strictest heat warnings for several cities in Southern Europe and the Balkans. Greece was forced to close its biggest cultural attraction, the Acropolis, due to excessive temperatures. France, which hosted the Olympic Games in late July, had heat warnings in place for much of the country.
Copernicus said most of Africa, the Middle East and Asia were also affected, as well as eastern Antarctica, where temperatures were much warmer than normal, scientists said.
“It’s going to keep getting worse because we’re not stopping the things that are making it worse,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies who was not involved in the report.
Schmidt noted that different methodologies and calculations could have produced slightly different results, including the possibility that records continued into July, but his main takeaway was that “the forces pushing temperatures up don’t stop when the record-breaking season ends.”
“Does it matter if July is record or not? No, what matters is that what’s affecting everybody is the fact that this year and last year have been much warmer than they were in the 1980s, before the industrial revolution, and we’re seeing the effects of that change,” Schmidt added.
Experts said people around the world would not be reassured by July’s figures.
“A lot of attention has been focused on this 13-month world record streak,” Copernicus’s Nicholas said, “but the effects of climate change have been seen for years, they started before June 2023 and won’t end just because this record streak is about to end.”
