The summer of Paris Olympics and political conventions may be winding down, but the heat is still going strong in 2024.
Southwestern United States’ sizzling Triple-digit temperatures this week Mark the tail end of the hottest summer on record, according to a new European climate report.
“We know that warming the planet leads to more intense and extreme climate events, and what we’ve seen this summer is no exception,” said Julian Nicolas, a climatologist at the Copernicus Climate Change Service, a European Union agency. The assessment was published on Wednesday.
Since 2018, the agency has been combining data such as weather observations from balloons and satellites with computer models that simulate temperature and precipitation to get a picture of what’s happening around the world. He reconstructs that picture with past weather conditions in 1940 to calculate the global average temperature.
According to the models, June and August were the warmest June and August on record, while July is not so clear.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, based in the United States, found that this July was three hundredths of a degree Celsius warmer than 2023, when Copernicus determined it was a few hundredths of a degree cooler than last year. For all practical purposes, it created a virtual tie, according to NOAA’s Caryn Gleason, speaking recently about her department’s findings.
“There are times when all the different data sets have slightly different statistics,” Ms. Gleason said, referring to the discrepancy between the NOAA and Copernicus data. “But they all essentially say the same thing. We are at or near record pace.”
That led to the planet’s hottest day on record this July. And all these records combine to increase the likelihood that 2024 will be the hottest year on record, Copernicus said.
That heat increases the likelihood of extreme weather events such as heat waves, heavy rainfall and floods and wildfires. Last year, Canadian forest fires spread so far that they released more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. All countries except three: United States, China and India.
“We have extreme heat and record-breaking rainfall events in many places on the list,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
“I wouldn’t be surprised to see an increase in heat deaths in the areas that have been hit the hardest this summer,” said Jeffrey Howard, associate professor of public health at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Displays the analysis data Heat-related deaths doubled In the United States in recent decades.
The Copernicus report also noted that August was the 13th out of 14 months in which global temperatures rose by 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above the pre-industrial average for that period, a threshold set by the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. .
While it’s only a temporary breach, scientists are now debating how and when to assess whether the world has surpassed the 1.5-degree milestone long enough or often enough to determine a trend.
Dr. “It’s up to the scientific community when and how we’ll know we’ve reached 1.5 degrees Celsius as the long-term average,” Nicholas said. Typically, such a change would be observed over a 20- to 30-year period, but computer-model projections make it possible to predict that change earlier, he said.
“We’re talking about a global ecosystem change that will affect all of us,” said Ashley Ward, director of Duke University’s Heat Policy Innovation Hub. “Our energy systems, built environment and medical services were never designed for this type of temperature regime.”
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