It’s getting hotter

Scientists say that the last 15 years have been the 10 hottest years in history. The hottest July on record occurred in 2019, but in 2023 this month will set another record, easily eclipsing 2019’s high temperatures. Then August did it, followed by the fall, winter and spring months of 2024. Generally The entire year 2023 was named the warmest year in observation history before the end of the year.

On June 5, the European Union’s Copernicus World Monitoring Service already announced this It’s been a whole year where every month has been the hottest month on recordThis has been going on since we had enough devices to track global temperatures.

Temperature history shows what extreme temperatures were like last year / Photo C3S/ECMWF

As you can see in the chart, for almost the entire period from June 2023 to May 2024, the average global temperature remained above 1.5 degrees compared to the pre-industrial period. This is the first such case in the history of observation. Previously, we only crossed this line in certain months, or I’m approaching it before it does.

This is important because many countries have promised to do everything to ensure that the planet does not exceed the 1.5 degree limit. But if earlier scientists were confident that we would still not be able to stop warming and cross the line by mid-century, we have actually achieved this in 2024.

For the first time in the entire history of observation, the temperature remained constant at 1.5° above the pre-industrial average / Photo C3S/ECMWF

Scientists now hope that the temperature will drop slightly in the near future. Past records were made possible by, among other things, the arrival of El Niño, a warm ocean current that warms the atmosphere.. It has now retreated and is being replaced by La Niña, which is characterized by the cooling of the ocean’s surface waters, which should lower the temperature.

Some scientists say that this sudden rise in temperature cannot even be explained by human activities and El Niño, which is such a sharp departure from previous figures that gradually increased the temperature. That’s why they’re looking for other reasons, even though they haven’t been successful so far. It is possible that the catastrophic eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haapai volcano, which threw significant amounts of water vapor into the upper atmosphere, created an additional greenhouse effect, but even that would not be enough, they say. Other than that, there is no clear explanation.