June sizzles to 13th straight monthly heat record
Earth’s more than year-long streak of record-shattering hot months kept on simmering through June, according to the European climate service Copernicus, AP reports.
There’s hope that the planet will soon see an end to the record-setting part of the heat streak, but not the climate chaos that has come with it, scientists said.
The global temperature in June was record warm for the 13th straight month and it marked the 12th straight month that the world was 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times, Copernicus said in an early Monday announcement.
“It’s a stark warning that we are getting closer to this very important limit set by the Paris Agreement,” Copernicus senior climate scientist Nicolas Julien said in an interview. “The global temperature continues to increase. It has at a rapid pace.”
That 1.5 degree temperature mark is important because that’s the warming limit nearly all the countries in the world agreed upon in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, though Julien and other meteorologists have said the threshold won’t be crossed until there’s long-term duration of the extended heat — as much as 20 or 30 years.
The globe for June 2024 averaged 62 degrees Fahrenheit (16.66 degrees Celsius), which is 1.2 degrees (0.67 Celsius) above the 30-year average for the month, according to Copernicus. It broke the record for hottest June, set a year earlier, by a quarter of a degree (0.14 degrees Celsius) and is the third-hottest of any month recorded in Copernicus records, which goes back to 1940, behind only last July and last August.
