The European Union Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) on Wednesday released data revealing that summer of 2023 marked the hottest-ever season on record.
This year's three-month period of June, July, and August surpassed previous heat records by a large margin since recording first began in 1940. The global average temperature this summer was 16.8 degrees Celsius (62.2 F), which is 0.66 degrees above the averages recorded between 1990 and 2020.
The new average is about 0.3 degrees celsius hotter than the previous record set in August 2019. The increase has proven significant as such heat records are typically broken by just hundredths of degrees; however, this summer, which is the hottest on record, is a major outlier.
Global average summer temperatures have been getting hotter since the early 1940s: the summer of 1952 recorded a global average temperature of 15.5 C. Then in the summer of 1983, the temperature was recorded at 15.8 C.
By the summer of 1998, another outlier appeared, with a red hot summer of 16.3 C. In the summer of 2022, the global average was 16.4 C, and just a year later, that temperature has skyrocketed to 16.4 C.
"The dog days of summer are not just barking, they are biting," warned UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in a statement coinciding with the release of the data. "Our planet has just endured a season of simmering — the hottest summer on record. Climate breakdown has begun."
“The northern hemisphere just had a summer of extremes — with repeated heat waves fueling devastating wildfires, harming health, disrupting daily lives and wreaking a lasting toll on the environment,” added Petteri Taalas, the Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
Taalas says the Southern Hemisphere, where the shrinkage of Antarctic Sea ice is rampant, was “literally off the charts” this summer while the global sea was “once again at a new record.”
The same data center predicted 2023 will also be the hottest year on record overall. As of now, it is right behind 2016 for temperature records. August of this year, meanwhile, was estimated to be around 1.5 C warmer than pre-industrial levels.
The sizzling weather is undoubtedly a result of human-caused climate change, which has been pushing global temperatures, and weather patterns, to new extremes; however, the arrival of the natural climate phenomenon known as El Niño has exacerbated the temperatures this year.
The heat waves in 2016, for example, can be partially tied to a strong El Niño event as well. But this year’s is expected to be even stronger, and may endure into the first months of 2024.
“The La Niña was suppressing the warming we’d otherwise experience in greenhouse gasses globally, and now this is enhancing it,” said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather. “Flipping from one to the other, it leads to these fairly large jumps in temperature.”
“There’s a lot of reason to suspect that the El Niño conditions that are currently growing are more likely to impact 2024 temperatures overall than this year.”