European Climate Agency: Sunday was the hottest day in the history of the planet

Sunday was the most important day warm in modern history of the planet, another record that has been broken in the last two years, the European climate agency Copernicus reported on Tuesday.

Preliminary data from Copernicus showed that the temperature The global average on Sunday was 17.09 degrees Celsius (62.76 °Fahrenheit), which broke the record set on July 6, 2023 by 0.01 °C (0.02 °F). Both Sunday’s mark and last year’s mark surpassed the previous record of 16.8 °C (62.24 °F) set in 2016.

Without man-made climate change, records would not be broken as frequently, and new cold records would be set as often as warm ones are set.

“What is truly astonishing is how big the difference is between the temperature of the past 13 months and previous temperature records,” Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement. “We are now in truly uncharted territory, and as the climate continues to warm, we are likely to see new records broken in the coming months and years.”

Why was Sunday the hottest day?

Although 2024 has been extremely warm, what pushed temperatures to new levels on Sunday was a warmer-than-usual Antarctic winter, according to Copernicus. The same was happening in that region last year, when the record was reached in early July.

But it wasn’t just Antarctica that got hotter on Sunday. Inland California was roasting with high temperatures, complicating more than two dozen wildfires in the western United States. At the same time, Europe is suffering from a deadly heat wave.

“It’s certainly a worrying sign that we’ve had a record-breaking 13 consecutive months,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, who estimates there’s a 92% chance that 2024 will surpass 2023 as the warmest year on record.

July is typically the warmest month of the year worldwide, particularly because there is a larger land area in the Northern Hemisphere, so seasonal patterns there determine global temperatures.

Copernicus records go back to 1940, but other global measurements by the U.S. and U.K. governments date back to 1880. Many scientists, taking that data into account along with tree rings and ice cores, say last year’s highs were the warmest on the planet in about 120,000 years. Now, the first six months of 2024 have matched them.

Scientists attribute the excessive heat primarily to climate change caused by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, as well as agriculture for livestock. Other factors include natural warming of the central Pacific Ocean from the El Niño phenomenon, which has now ended. Decreased ocean pollution from fuel and possibly an underwater volcanic eruption are also causing some extra heat, but they are not as significant as greenhouse gases, they said.

With El Niño likely to be replaced soon by a cooling La Niña, Hausfather said he would be surprised if monthly records were broken again in 2024, but the warm start to the year will likely be enough to make it warmer than last year.

The level of heat reached on Sunday is certainly notable, but “what is really striking” is how much warmer recent years have been than previous levels, said Northern Illinois University climatologist Victor Gensini, who was not part of the Copernicus team. “It is certainly a signature of climate change.”

According to Michael Mann, a climatologist at the University of Pennsylvania, the difference between this year’s peak and last year’s is so tiny and so preliminary that he is surprised the European climate agency is publishing it.

“We should never really compare absolute temperatures on individual days,” Mann said in an email.

Yes, it’s a small difference, Gensini noted in an interview, but there have been more than 30,500 days since Copernicus data began in 1940, and this is the warmest of them all.

“This is what matters,” said Texas A&M University climatologist Andrew Dessler. “Warming will continue as long as we keep putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and we have the technology today to largely stop doing that. What we lack is the political will.”