“The world has just had its warmest start to June on record, following a May that was just 0.1°C cooler than record,” Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the European Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). “Mean global surface air temperatures for the early days of June were the highest recorded in the ERA5 dataset [atmospheric reanalysis dataset] for early June, and by a substantial margin “, reports Copernicus, whose data goes back for some to 1950.
The release of these readings comes as the El Niño weather phenomenon, usually associated with an increase in global temperatures, has officially begun, recalls Copernicus. The latter also recently announced that the surface of the oceans had just experienced its warmest May on record.
Copernicus also recalls that in early June, global temperatures exceeded pre-industrial levels by more than 1.5°C, which is the most ambitious warming limit of the 2015 Paris agreement. It is the first time that this limit has been crossed in June but it has already been crossed several times in winter and spring in recent years.
“Every fraction of a degree counts to avoid even more serious consequences of the climate crisis”, insisted Samantha Burgess.
Copernicus is based in Bonn, the very place where international climate negotiations are currently being held under the aegis of the United Nations, before the big COP28, scheduled for Dubai at the end of the year.