Earth has sweltered through its hottest northern hemisphere summer ever measured, with a record warm August capping a season of brutal and deadly temperatures, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said yesterday.
Last month was not only the hottest August scientists have recorded with modern equipment, it was also the second-hottest month measured, behind only July, the WMO and the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said.
Last month was about 1.5°C warmer than preindustrial averages. That is the threshold that the world is trying not to pass, although scientists are more concerned about rises in temperatures over decades, not merely a blip over a month.
Photo: AP
The world’s oceans — more than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface — were the hottest recorded, at nearly 21°C, and have set high temperature marks for three consecutive months, the WMO and Copernicus said.
“The dog days of summer are not just barking, they are biting,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement. “Climate breakdown has begun.”
So far, this year is the second-hottest year on record, behind 2016, Copernicus said.
Scientists blame ever warming human-caused climate change on the burning of coal, oil and natural gas with an extra push from a natural El Nino, which is a temporary warming of parts of the Pacific Ocean that changes weather worldwide. Usually an El Nino, which started earlier this year, adds extra heat to global temperatures, but more so in its second year.
Climatologist Andrew Weaver said that the numbers announced by WMO and Copernicus come as no surprise, adding that governments have not appeared to take the issue of global warming seriously enough.
He expressed concern that the public will just forget the issue when temperatures fall again.
“It’s time for global leaders to start telling the truth,” said Weaver, a professor at the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria in Canada. “We will not limit warming to 1.5°C. We will not limit warming to 2°C. It’s all hands on deck now to prevent 3°C global warming — a level of warming that will wreak havoc worldwide.”
Copernicus, a division of the EU’s space program, has records going back to 1940, but in the UK and the US, global records go back to the mid-1800s and those weather and science agencies are expected to soon report that the summer was a record-breaker.
“What we are observing, not only new extremes, but the persistence of these record-breaking conditions, and the impacts these have on both people and planet, are a clear consequence of the warming of the climate system,” Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo said.
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