Fresh global heat records are piling up. Global ocean temperatures were never higher in a month of June and that includes an exceptional spike in the North Atlantic. The world also never experienced a warmer month of June than this year. In addition several day records have already been trashed in July. We are experiencing the warmest week ever on Earth. "We must prepare for things that are unprecedented" says climatologist Nicole Van Lipzig.
It was expected that the new monthly report from Copernicus, the European climate service, would be alarming, and it has turned out to be so. It is yet another sign that global warming is going faster and faster after the warmest day ever for the entire planet was recorded earlier this week.
The cause is twofold: we keep pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere through the use of fossil fuels, while global warming is currently being exacerbated by the recurring El Niño weather phenomenon. Scientists have repeatedly warned records would be trashed.
The Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia died off en masse in 2016 due to warming ocean water, partly a result of the previous El Niño.
The earth has now experienced the warmest month of June ever. June 2023 turns out to be a whopping 0.53 degrees warmer than the long-term average between 1991 to 2020. Half a degree doesn't seem like much, but globally, fluctuations are smaller and every tenth of a degree counts.
"It's a huge jump," confirms climatologist Nicole Van Lipzig (Leuven University). "It means we have to prepare for things that are unprecedented."
The previous record dating from June 2019 was broken by a fairly wide margin, according to the Copernicus graph. The graph shows the annual deviations from the 30-year average 1991-2020, showing how the planet has continued to warm in recent years.
"There is a lot coming our way: extreme rains, drought, forest fires, extreme heat records. This is just the tip of the iceberg," warns Van Lipzig, professor of geography at Leuven University. "In the future, these phenomena are going to get even stronger."
Van Lipzig says the climate models did predict this but admits that "as far as extremes are concerned, things are going very fast" at the moment. "The impact on society by the increasing of these extremes is very big. The good news is that we know what we can do about it (abandon fossil fuels as soon as possible) and it is certainly not too late," Van Lipzig stresses. After all, every tenth of a degree increase that can be averted counts.