The latest announcement by the European Observatory Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) is disturbing and alarming. It has revealed that mankind has just experienced the hottest summer ever measured. The three summer months from June to August 2024 saw the highest average global temperature since records began. Thus beating the record already set in 2023. This terrifying rise in the temperature is also accompanied by a series of climatic catastrophes – heatwaves, floods, hurricanes, forest fires and droughts. These will be followed by the human tragedies they provoke and the concomitant crisis of the collapse of biodiversity.
Data from the C3S followed a season of heatwaves around the world that scientists said were intensified by human-driven climate change. “During the past three months of 2024, the globe has experienced the hottest June and August, the hottest period and the hottest boreal summer on record,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of C3S. Heat was exacerbated in 2023 and early 2024 by the cyclical weather phenomenon El Nino, which warms the surface waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The contrary cyclical cooling phenomenon, known as La Nina, has not yet started. Conversely, moving against the global trend, regions such as Alaska, the eastern United States, parts of South America, Pakistan and the Sahel desert zone in northern Africa had lower-than-average temperatures in August, said the report. The planet’s changing climate continued to drive disasters this summer. In Sudan, flooding from heavy rains last month affected more than 300,000 people and brought cholera to the war-torn country. Elsewhere, scientists confirmed climate change intensified Typhoon Gaemi, which tore through the Philippines, Taiwan and China in July, killing more than 100 people. The silver lining is that this dynamic is not irreversible. Solutions do exist and they are being undertaken with tangible results.
A series of surveys published since 1 September under the title “Repairing the Earth” have been carried out in Romania, Italy, Benin, the Mediterranean Sea, India and Denmark in fields as diverse as household waste treatment, marine biodiversity and carbon neutrality in urban areas. The positive signs that emanate reflect a common desire to combine a move away from fossil fuels with an end to the over-exploitation of natural environments, without sacrificing the democratic framework in the negotiation of such a complex turn of events. Governments have targets to reduce their countries’ emissions to try to keep the rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius under the 2015 Paris climate agreement. But the United Nations has said the world is not on track to meet the long-term goals of that deal. Global temperatures in June to August broke through the level of 1.5 C above the pre-industrial average – a key threshold for limiting the worst effects of climate change. Scientists will not consider that threshold to be definitively passed until it has been observed being breached over several decades. The average level of warming is currently about 1.2 C, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). But C3S said the 1.5 C level has been passed during 13 of the past 14 months.
In August, the average global temperature at Earth’s surface was 16.82 C, according to the European monitor, which draws on billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations. Summer temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were the highest ever recorded, reinforcing that this year could emerge as Earth’s hottest ever, according to the European Union’s climate change monitor. Different world bodies working to contain global warming have been warning governments of developed countries, in particular, not to delay the fight to bring the temperature within the permissible limit. But, the warnings are not taken with the seriousness they deserve. Now, the disclosure of the figures of the hottest summer is one more graphic way to bring home the alarming truth. However, many important politicians across the globe, like Donald Trump, do not agree with this view that the Earth deserves a soothing touch now. Such people in or out of power in different countries may make or mar the future of humankind.