Last June was the hottest month ever recorded in the world. And summer 2023 promises to be one of the hottest in human history: the European Copernicus observatory has revealed that the combined effect of climate change and the return of the El Nino phenomenon is pushing ocean and land temperatures to unprecedented levels.
Already since last April, there has been one temperature record after another across the globe, from China to Spain via the Atlantic Ocean. It is the most direct reflection of climate change, along with the extreme natural events it is fueling: forest fires, droughts, extraordinary rainfall. “June was the hottest month on record, more than 0.5 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 average, surpassing the previous record set in June 2019,” said the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Observatory (C3S), whose data, dating back to 1950, is among the most widely used in the world with that of the American NOAA. Temperatures broke records in northwestern Europe, while parts of Canada, the United States, Mexico, Asia and eastern Australia “have been significantly warmer than normal,” notes Copernicus, which emphasizes the magnitude of the deviation from normal.
In contrast, it has been colder than normal in western Australia, the western United States and western Russia. While June has been consistently above the 1991-2020 averages for the past 15 years, this year’s was more so. The global average temperature was 16.51 C in June, or 0.53 C above the average of the previous three decades. The previous record, in June 2019, was only 0.37 C above these normal values.
