Did You Suffer a Sweltering August? You Weren't Alone. It Tied for the Month With the Hottest Global Temperatures on Record

If you thought this August was especially hot, you aren’t wrong. According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, last month tied with July 2023 as the hottest month on its record, which dates back to 1940. The global surface air temperature averaged 62.53 degrees Fahrenheit in August.

That’s almost 3 degrees above pre-industrial levels, which exceeds the 2.7-degree threshold set by the Paris Agreement, an international treaty on climate change adopted by nearly 200 nations in 2015. So did the contiguous United States, where the average temperature in August hit 75.6 degrees—3.5 degrees above the 20th-century average. It was the warmest season on the U.S.’s record, which stretches back to 1895, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information.

July was even hotter, averaging 76.9 degrees and breaking the infamous Dust Bowl record set in July 1936, per Jeff Masters and Bob Henson at Yale Climate Connections. Other parts of the world were also drier than average, including northern Mexico, parts of Canada, the Maghreb, part of the Horn of Africa, Siberia and large parts of Asia, China, South America, South Africa and northern Australia, according to Copernicus. And at 69.9 degrees, the average sea surface temperature outside the polar regions was the highest on record for any August, passing the record previously set for the month in 2023.

According to Copernicus, the record-breaking summer heat likely arose from two factors: a strengthening El Niño in the Pacific Ocean and global heating from human use of fossil fuels. Scientists note that the naturally occurring climate pattern of El Niño alone is not responsible for these temperatures. Climate change makes every El Niño hotter, and until we stop burning coal, oil and gas these record-shattering months will simply keep on coming,” says Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, to Seth Borenstein at the .

Quick fact: El Niño events have been growing stronger Using records captured in corals, a study published in August found that although El Niño climate swings occur naturally, they’ve become stronger in recent decades. That’s probably happening because humans have been heating up the planet. The Copernicus finding follows a United Nations report that warned that passing the Paris Agreement’s 2.7-degree threshold is probably unavoidable.

According to the U.N. document, titled “Limiting Overshoot” and published on September 2, the world now needs to focus on minimizing peak warming and finding ways to bring temperatures back down. Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, writes on social media that the Copernicus report is “another stark warning sign from our heating planet,” and underscores the need for humans to stop burning coal, oil and gas. Her work has appeared in Sierra, The Body, Maisonneuve magazine and more.