European Climate Agency: Last Sunday was the warmest day on Earth in history

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sunday was the warmest day ever recorded by humans on Earth, breaking yet another heat record in recent years, the European climate service Copernicus reported Tuesday.

Preliminary data from Copernicus shows that the average temperature on Sunday was 17.09 degrees Celsius (62.76 degrees Fahrenheit), breaking last year’s record, set on July 6, 2023, by 0.01 degrees Celsius (0.02 degrees Fahrenheit). Both Sunday’s record and last year’s record smash the previous record of 16.8 degrees Celsius (62.24 degrees Fahrenheit), which was itself only a few years old, set in 2016.

Without human-caused climate change, records would not be broken nearly as often and cold records would be set just as often as warm records.

“What is truly astonishing is the difference between the temperature of the last 13 months and the previous temperature records,” Copernius Director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement. “We are now in truly uncharted territory and as the climate continues to warm, we will undoubtedly see new records being broken in the months and years to come.”

While 2024 has been an exceptionally warm year, what landed in new territory on Sunday was a much warmer Antarctic winter than normal, according to Copernicus. The same thing happened on the southern continent last year when the record was set in early July.

But it wasn’t just a warmer Antarctica on Sunday. Inland California was scorched with triple-digit Fahrenheit temperatures, complicating more than two dozen fires across the American West. At the same time, Europe was sweltering under its own deadly heat wave.

“It’s certainly a worrying sign, coming off 13 straight months of record-breaking weather,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley, who now estimates there’s a 92 percent chance 2024 will surpass 2023 as the warmest year on record.

July is generally the warmest month of the year worldwide. This is mainly because there is more land in the Northern Hemisphere and seasonal patterns there influence global temperatures.

Copernicus data goes back to 1940, but other global measurements by the US and UK governments go back even further, to 1880. Many scientists, looking at these, along with tree rings and ice cores, say last year’s record highs were the warmest the planet has been in about 120,000 years. Now the first six months of 2024 have broken even those records.

Scientists blame the supercharged heat largely on climate change from burning coal, oil and natural gas, and from cattle ranching. Other factors include a natural El Niño warming of the central Pacific Ocean, which has now ended. Reduced pollution from marine fuels and a possible undersea volcanic eruption also provide some extra heat, but they are not as significant as heat-trapping 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 are broken again in 2024. Still, the warm start to the year is likely enough to make it warmer than last year.

Sure, Sunday’s mark is notable, but “what really makes your eyes pop” is how much hotter the last few years have been than any previous mark, said Northern Illinois University climate scientist Victor Gensini, who was not part of the Copernicus team. “It’s definitely a fingerprint of climate change.”

Climate scientist Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania said the difference between this year’s highest values ​​and last year’s is so small and preliminary that he is surprised the European Climate Agency is raising it.

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

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

“What matters is this,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. “The warming will continue as long as we keep putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and we have the technology to stop most of that today. What we lack is political will.”

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