June off to its hottest start on record between El Niño and climate change
Average global temperatures in early June were the hottest ever recorded by the European Copernicus service, beating previous records by a "substantial margin".
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"The world has just had its warmest start to June on record, after a month of May that was only 0.1°C cooler than the record," Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), said in a statement on Thursday.
The European agency, based in Bonn, Germany, has data dating back to 1950.
"Average global surface air temperatures for the first days of June were the highest recorded in the ERA5 dataset for an early June, and by a substantial margin," Copernicus stated in its findings.
The Earth's surface temperature last month tied as the second hottest for May, according to C3S.
These readings come as the El Niño weather phenomenon, generally associated with an increase in global temperatures, has officially begun.
'Every fraction of a degree counts'
"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," François-Marie Bréon, deputy director of the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences (LSCE), told French news agency AFP.
"If a year is particularly hot, it is not necessarily significant, but what is of course is this heavy trend which shows an increase in temperatures of about 2 tenths of a degree per decade," Bréon says.
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 the global average temperature "well below 2°C" and to 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," Burgess said.
Climate talks
International climate negotiations are being held this week in Bonn, organised by the UN, before the big COP28 talks scheduled for Dubai at the end of the year.
The question of fossil fuels, the main causes of global warming, will be high on the agenda.
"El Niño years have always been warm, but now they come against a backdrop of warming exacerbated by the use of fossil fuels, decade after decade, which has made extreme temperatures more likely," Richard Hodgkins, professor of physical geography at the British University of Loughborough told AFP.
Heat episodes "have the effect of forest fires, the melting of ice at the poles or an increase in the demand for electricity for air conditioning", all of which only add to the warming, he points out.
The drought hitting Europe and the monster fires are ravaging Canada are just two examples.
Specialists are also currently wondering about a phenomenon of "exceptionally high" temperatures in the North Atlantic, Bréon says.
Most of the warmest years on record have occurred during El Niño, and scientists are concerned that this summer and next could see record temperatures on land and in the sea.
(with AFP)
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