After the hottest June in recent history (0.5 degrees above the average of the last three decades), came the three hottest days ever recorded since 1979, when satellite measurements were incorporated. On July 3, 4 and 5, the maximum temperature records were set consecutively on a global scale (17.01 degrees on Monday, and 17.18 degrees on both Tuesday and Wednesday, compared to the current record of 16.92 ºC measured in August 2016).
Scientists have put a special effort into trying to explain what this means. Paulo Ceppi, a climatologist at the Grantham Institute in London, stresses how we are not only looking at the maximum records since the mid-19th century, when measurements began at the dawn of the it was not industrial, but before “indicators of the hottest period on Earth in the last 125,000 years” (in the earlier known warm interglacial period the Eemian).
“It would not be surprising if new records were set throughout the month of July”Ceppi warns. “After all, summer has only just begun in the northern hemisphere and El Niño (the natural weather phenomenon that causes the eastern and equatorial Pacific to warm) has not yet peaked.”
Scientists often emphasize that what matters are not the specific and isolated episodes, but the trends. “Although there will be a slight drop in temperatures momentarily, it is foreseeable that a new global maximum temperature will be registered at the end of July, with days even hotter than the ones we have had this week,” warns Karsten Haustein, of the Environmental Change Institute in Oxford.
The data released on Thursday by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) is a clear indication of what awaits us this summer. In the month of June there were registered temperatures that exceeded the average of 1991-2020 by half a degree and left behind “by a considerable margin” the previous record set in 2019.