Earth Reached Its Hottest Day on Record Twice in a Row This Week

On Monday, the world landed yet another all-time high temperature record. If this sounds like nothing new, that might be because the previous record was set just one day before.

Now, July 22 is the hottest day in the history books, with the Earth seeing an average temperature of 17.15 degrees Celsius, or 62.87 degrees Fahrenheit, according to preliminary data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). Monday broke a record also set this week, on Sunday, July 21, when the global average temperature hit 17.09 degrees Celsius (62.76 degrees Fahrenheit).

A Fahrenheit temperature in the low 60s might not sound unbearable, but keep in mind that it’s a global average—and while the Northern Hemisphere is at the height of summer right now, the south is in the depths of winter. Moreover, before this week, the previous record for the world’s hottest day just came not too long ago, on July 6, 2023, when the mercury climbed to 17.08 degrees Celsius, or 62.74 degrees Fahrenheit.

New daily global average temperature record.

As anticipated, the #CopernicusClimate ERA5 preliminary data show that Monday 22 July was the warmest day in recent history, at 17.15°C, breaking the records from 21 July 24 and 6 July 23.

Read more: https://t.co/FCDXtIadxn pic.twitter.com/WxfcjXF8hl

— Copernicus ECMWF (@CopernicusECMWF) July 24, 2024

The first new record was set by a narrow margin, but the change from Sunday to Monday is larger than a typical day-to-day variation, per a statement from C3S. And what’s also worrisome is the incessant trend of warming accompanying the new milestone. Each of the last 13 months has been the hottest month of its kind ever recorded. In another benchmark, 2024 is all but ready to wrest the title of the world’s hottest year in modern history from the last holder, 2023. According to Sarah Kaplan of the Washington Post, data from tree rings, ice cores and lake sediments have given paleoclimate scientists good reason to believe that temperatures in the past 100,000 years never reached the limits we are seeing today.

“We are now in truly uncharted territory,” Carlo Buontempo, director of C3S, says in the statement. “As the climate keeps warming, we are bound to see new records being broken in future months and years.”

Regions around the planet are feeling these unprecedented temperatures. This summer, heat waves cooked the American Northeast and Midwest. Nearly five billion people, or 60 percent of the world’s population, experienced extreme heat over a nine-day period in June. Wildfires are blazing all along the western U.S. and Canada. On July 22, even swaths of Antarctica were 12 degrees Celsius (22 degrees Fahrenheit) above their historical norm.

The spiking temperatures pose public health hazards. Heat waves have been implicated in over 300 deaths in Maricopa County, Arizona, this summer. In Saudi Arabia, more than 1,300 people died during last June’s Hajj, a Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, as temperatures hit 120 degrees Fahrenheit. With the Paris Olympic Games around the corner, some athletes have expressed concern about competing under potentially life-threatening conditions of extreme heat and humidity.

“We are in an age where weather and climate records are frequently stretched beyond our tolerance levels, resulting in insurmountable loss of lives and livelihoods,” Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, tells Sibi Arasu and Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press.

Experts attribute much of this warming to the climate crisis, which in turn is caused by humanity’s rampant burning of fossil fuels. Fossil fuel combustion releases greenhouse gases such as CO2 into the atmosphere that prevent heat from escaping into space.

To avert the most disastrous effects of climate change, humans need to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, per the 2015 Paris Agreement. Meeting that goal would require global coal, oil and natural gas use to drop by at least 95 percent, 62 percent and 42 percent, respectively, before 2050. But at our current trajectory, the world is on track to surpass the Paris Agreement limit as early as 2026. And even if the world manages to cease human-caused emissions today, temperatures would continue to climb for the next few decades, until all the excess heat finally leaks out to space.

For now, a reprieve is on the horizon. C3S projects the worst of this heat to be over as temperatures fall in the next few days. Later this year will see the arrival of a climate phenomenon known as La Niña, which will bring planet-wide cooling but potentially more severe hurricanes in parts of the world. Going forward, climate change is likely to exacerbate extreme weather and increase its frequency.

“Just a quick glance at the range of events happening around the globe right now—wildfires, flooding, heatwaves—tells us that we are not remotely prepared for the extremes that this warmer world has bought us,” Peter Thorne, a climatologist at Maynooth University in Ireland, tells Ajit Niranjan of the Guardian. “We are even less prepared for what is to come.”

Shi En Kim | | READ MORE

Shi En Kim is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance science journalist. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Scientific American, the Atlantic, Popular Science and others. In 2021, she interned at Smithsonian magazine as an AAAS Mass Media Fellow.