Planet Earth has just felt the warmest day in recent history, reaching 17.15ºC on 22 July 2024, according to Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) data.
The Service’s data shows that the global average temperature has been steadily creeping up, breaking a series of records over recent days and in the last year. While the difference between the records might seem infinitesimal, (a rise of 0.06% from 17.09ºC on 21 July for example), these increases are, the scientists say, larger than typical day-to-day variations among alternative datasets.
The information can all be consulted openly on Climate Pulse, an interactive dataset designed to”make climate monitoring more accessible to a broad audience.” The page “provides daily charts and maps of global surface air temperature and sea surface temperature updated close to real-time, as well as an archive of past daily, monthly and annual maps.”
“Truly staggering”
What is clear and “truly staggering”, in the words of C3S Director Carlo Buontempo, is that a step change seems to have occurred in the summer of 2023. Before July of that year, the daily global average temperature record stood at 16.8°C, measured on 13 August 2016. But in the year since 3 July 2023 there have been 58 further days that have beaten 2016’s record, distributed over just four northern hemisphere summer months.
“What is truly staggering is how large the difference is between the temperature of the last 13 months and the previous temperature records. We are now in truly uncharted territory and as the climate keeps warming, we are bound to see new records being broken in future months and years,” Buontempo commented on the data.
What happens next?
The rising mercury coincides with the northern hemisphere summer because of seasonal weather patterns that drive the overall global temperatures. Northern hemisphere land masses warm up faster than the southern oceans can cool the Earth down.
Indeed, the CS3 is suggesting that the shift seen in daily global average temperature is related to temperatures far above average over large parts of Antarctica. Diminished Antarctic sea ice is also driving up temperatures in the Southern Ocean and climate analysts are expecting global average temperatures to reach a peak about now, with further ups and downs over the next weeks.
The next phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the development of La Niña will make predictions difficult to make, but Berkeley Earth climate scientist, Zeke Hausfather, now estimates there’s a 92% chance that 2024 will beat 2023 as the warmest year on record.
