And summer is just beginning.
Above, global view from Europe, Asia, and South America, of the globally hottest days ever recorded by humans.
The sharp jump in temperatures has unsettled even those scientists who have been tracking climate change.
“It’s so far out of line of what’s been observed that it’s hard to wrap your head around,” said Brian McNoldy, a senior research scientist at the University of Miami. “It doesn’t seem real.”
On Tuesday, global average temperatures climbed to 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 17 Celsius, making it the hottest day Earth has experienced since at least 1940, when records began, and very likely before that, according to an analysis by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Since that was an average, parts of the globe felt that extra heat more forcefully. For instance, in the Southern United States and Northern Mexico, where the heat index has reached triple digits, climate change has made the ongoing heat wave about 5 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than it would have been otherwise, according to scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.
The overall warming of the planet is “well within the realm of what scientists had projected would happen” as humans continue to pump vast amounts of heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth and the payments company Stripe.
On the whole, Earth has warmed roughly 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the 19th century and will continue to grow hotter until humans essentially halt all emissions from fossil fuels and stop deforestation.
But other factors layered on top of human-caused warming may have helped temperatures accelerate dramatically in recent months. For instance, a cyclical phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation causes year-to-year fluctuations by shifting heat in and out of deeper ocean layers. Global surface temperatures tend to be cooler during La Niña years and hotter during El Niño years.
“A big reason we’re seeing so many records shattered is that we’re transitioning out of an unusually long three-year La Niña, which suppressed temperatures, and into a strong El Niño,” Dr. Hausfather said.
That likely portends even more heat is coming. The current El Niño is just getting underway and many researchers don’t expect it to peak until December or January, with global temperatures seeing another surge in the months thereafter. That means that next year could be even hotter than this year, scientists said.
Earth’s climate has become a monster on the loose!
We were nearly breaking records during La Ninas and the la Nada. This El Nino was always going to be one for the books. Shocking yes, but we should not be at all surprised.
Despite the push back of doomerism, I have a hard time understanding how limiting warming to 1.5C (as unlikely as that would be) is somehow safe when we are dealing with all the issues we currently have, while still not yet at that point.