The global average temperatures recorded in early June were the hottest ever recorded for this period by the European service Copernicus, beating previous records by a “substantial margin”, a probable foretaste of the El Niño phenomenon. “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 service, said in a statement Thursday. on climate change (C3S).
“Mean global surface air temperatures for the early days of June were the highest recorded in the ERA5 dataset for early June, and by a substantial margin,” says Copernicus, whose data some date back to 1950.
“It’s not surprising because there is a tendency for temperatures to increase” and “we knew that when an El Niño event develops, it tends to raise temperatures by a few tens of degrees “, commented François-Marie Bréon, deputy director of the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences (LSCE), interviewed by AFP.
These readings come as the El Niño weather phenomenon, generally 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. “If a year is particularly hot, it’s not necessarily significant, but what is of course is this strong trend which shows an increase in temperatures of about 2 tenths of a degree per decade”, underlines Francois-Marie Breon.
Copernicus also points out 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. This is the first time that this limit was crossed in June, but it has already been crossed several times in winter and spring in recent years. The Paris Agreement aims to keep the increase in global average temperature “well below 2°C” and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C instead. “Every fraction of a degree counts to avoid even more serious consequences of the climate crisis”, underlined Samantha Burgess.
Copernicus is based in Bonn, the very place where international climate negotiations are currently being held under the aegis of the UN, before the big COP28 scheduled for Dubai at the end of the year. The question of humanity’s use of fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas), the main causes of global warming, will be hotly debated on this occasion.
“El Niño years have always been warm, but they are now coming against a backdrop of decade-after-decade fossil-fuel fueled warming that has made extreme temperatures more likely,” said Richard Hodgkins, professor of physical geography. at Britain’s Loughborough University.
Heat spells “result in forest fires, melting ice at the poles, or increased demand for electricity for air conditioning,” “all of which just add to the warming,” he concludes, then that drought is hitting Europe and that monster fires are ravaging Canada right now. Specialists are also currently wondering about an “exceptionally high” temperature phenomenon in the North Atlantic, says François-Marie Bréon.