Copernicus Climate Change Service

The 2024 northern summer saw the highest global temperatures ever recorded, beating last year's record and making this year likely Earth's hottest ever, the EU's climate monitor said Friday.

The data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service followed a season of heatwaves around the world that scientists said were intensified by human-driven climate change.

It is "increasingly likely" 2024 will be the hottest year on record, despite July ending a 13-month streak of monthly temperature records, the EU's climate monitor said Thursday.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said last month was the second warmest on record books going back to 1940, only slightly cooler than July 2023.

People cool off in misters along the Las Vegas Strip, Sunday, July 7, 2024, in Las Vegas

Last month was the hottest June on record across the globe, the EU's climate monitor said Monday, capping half a year of wild and destructive weather from floods to heatwaves.

The rapid return of the La Nina weather phenomenon "may actually decrease" the risk that 2024 smashes last year's record heat, Europe's climate monitor told AFP, amid enduring historic global temperatures.

This winter has been the hottest in recorded Greek history, according to preliminary data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) analyzed by the scientific team of the National Observatory of Athens, meteo.gr.

Blazes in Greece burned for a seventh day on Friday, destroying tens of thousands of hectares of land in the northeast alone, in what the EU-backed Copernicus Climate Change Service said was the largest recorded wildfire on European soil in years.

This past June was the hottest June globally on record in terms of sea and air temperatures, according to a statement by the EU-backed Copernicus Climate Change Service.

"The month was the warmest June globally at just over 0.5°C above the 1991-2020 average, exceeding June 2019 - the previous record - by a substantial margin," the Copernicus report said.

Sea ice in Antarctica shrank to the smallest area on record in February for the second year in a row, continuing a decade-long decline, the European Union's climate monitoring service said March 7.

Last month saw the lowest extent of Antarctic sea ice on record for July, according to the European Union's satellite monitoring group.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) found Antarctic sea ice extent reached 15.3 million square kilometers - some 1.1 million km2, or seven percent, below the 1991-2020 average for July.

Europe endured record heat and rainfall last year while temperatures in Arctic Siberia soared off the charts, the European Union's climate monitoring service reported on April 22. 

The continent in 2020 was nearly half a degree Celsius hotter than the next warmest year, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).