Monday breaks Earth’s hottest day record

Monday was recorded as the hottest day on Earth, Europe’s climate change service said, breaking a record set the day before, as countries around the world from Japan to Bolivia to the United States continued to feel the heat.

Provisional satellite data released Copernicus Data from Wednesday showed the temperature on Monday was 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.1 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the day before.

Climate scientists say global temperatures are as high today as they were 125,000 years ago because of human-caused climate change. While scientists can’t say for sure if Monday was the hottest day in that period, average temperatures have never been this high since humans developed agriculture.

The rise in temperatures in recent decades is consistent with what climate scientists predict will happen if humans continue to burn fossil fuels at an increasingly rapid rate.

“We are in an era where weather and climate records are regularly exceeding our expectations, causing irreparable loss of life and livelihoods,” said Roxie Matthew Cole, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology.

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Preliminary data from Copernicus showed the global average temperature on Monday was 17.15 degrees Celsius, or 62.87 degrees Fahrenheit. The previous record this week was set a year ago. Before last year, the previous hottest day on record was in 2016, when the average temperature was 16.8 degrees Celsius, or 62.24 degrees Fahrenheit.

Copernicus said that while 2024 has been very warm, winter temperatures in Antarctica this week were higher than usual, breaking previous records. The same situation occurred in the southern continent in early July last year, setting a record high.

Copernicus records date back to 1940, but other global measurements from the U.S. and U.K. governments go back even further, to 1880. Many scientists consider those records along with tree rings and ice cores to suggest last year’s record temperatures were the hottest the Earth has seen in about 120,000 years. Now, the first half of 2024 has already broken those records.

No Human-caused climate changeScientists say extreme temperature records will not be broken as frequently as in recent years.

Christiana Figueres, former head of UN climate negotiations, said that if the world does not change course immediately, “we will all be in trouble”, “but targeted national policies must enable this transformation.”

Scientists said it was “incredible” to have such warm weather two years in a row, especially since a natural El Nino event in the central Pacific Ocean ended earlier this year. “This is yet another demonstration of how much the Earth’s climate is warming,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.