Earth's 13 consecutive months with a new average heat record came to an end this past July but the month in 2024 just missed surpassing average heat it recorded last year, according to European climate agency Copernicus. Earth's string of 13 straight months ended as the natural El Nino climate pattern ebbed, the Copernicus announced Wednesday, adding that the overall context hasn't changed."
"Our climate continues to warm," Copernicus deputy director Samantha Burgess said in a statement cited in a news agency PTI report.
According to Copernicus, the last month is the second-warmest July and second-warmest of any month recorded in its records, behind only July 2023. The Earth also had its two hottest days on record, on July 22 and July 23, each averaging about 62.9 degrees Fahrenheit (17.16 degrees Celsius).
"July 2024 was both the second-warmest July and the second-warmest month globally in the data record, with an average ERA5 surface air temperature of 16.91 degrees Celsius, 0.68 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 average for July, and only 0.04 degrees Celsius lower than the previous high set in July 2023," Copernicus said.
"This marks the end of a 13-month period when each month was the warmest in the ERA5 data record for the respective month of the year. While unusual, a similar length streak of monthly global temperature records happened previously in 2015/2016 during the last strong El Niño event," it added.
The global average for July 2024 was 62.4 degrees Fahrenheit (16.91 degrees Celsius), which is 1.2 degrees (0.68 Celsius) above the 30-year average for the month, according to Copernicus. Temperatures were a small fraction lower than the same period last year.
Trend Of Warming
During July, the world was 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer, by Copernicus' measurement, than pre-industrial times. That's close to the warming limit that nearly all the countries in the world agreed to in the 2015 Paris climate agreement: 1.5 degrees.
El Nino — which naturally warms the Pacific Ocean and changes weather across the globe — spurred the 13 months of record heat, said Copernicus senior climate scientist Julien Nicolas. That has come to a close, hence July's slight easing of temperatures. La Nina conditions — natural cooling — aren't expected until later in the year.
But there's still a general trend of warming.
“The global picture is not that much different from where we were a year ago,” Nicolas said in an interview.
According to Copernicus website, "The year-to-date (January–July) global temperature anomaly for 2024 is 0.70°C above the 1991-2020 average, 0.27°C warmer than the same period in 2023. The average anomaly for the remaining months of this year would need to drop by at least 0.23°C for 2024 not to be warmer than 2023."
This rarely happened in the entire ERA5 dataset, making it increasingly likely that 2024 is going to be the warmest year on record, the website reads.
“Things are going to continue to get worse because we haven't stopped doing the thing that's making them worse,” said Gavin Schmidt, climatologist and director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who wasn't part of the report.
