UN climate chief Simon Stiell said the \u201cevidence is irrefutable: this is the spiralling price of humanity\u2019s fossil fuel addiction\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u2018Striking\u2019 <\/p>\n
The exceptional summer also drove ocean temperatures to record highs for three straight months, said Simon van Gennip, from Mercator Ocean International, on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Marine heatwaves have persisted in some overheated basins for more than 60 days, \u201chighlighting just how unusual and persistent\u201d the situation was, he said.<\/p>\n
Global sea surface temperatures set a new all-time daily high in August and equalled the hottest month for oceans ever recorded.<\/p>\n
Copernicus said the main driver was global heating from burning coal, oil and gas, but also sharp-rising temperatures in the Pacific, where a historic El Ni\u00f1o is gaining strength.<\/p>\n
El Ni\u00f1o episodes are characterised by unusually warm Pacific waters but trigger major global changes in rainfall and winds, raising the odds of wild weather thousands of miles away.<\/p>\n
Global forecasters predict this year\u2019s event will peak later this year at an intensity never observed in the modern era.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said there was a 75% chance it \u201cwould exceed the strength of previous El Ni\u00f1o events dating back to 1950\u201d.<\/p>\n
Copernicus said its influence was already being felt in Indonesia, where a long, intense dry season has fed wildfires that have torched swathes of Borneo island.<\/p>\n
But climate scientists said the worst was yet to come \u2013 and August\u2019s extraordinary heat was just a preview.<\/p>\n
Even ordinary El Ni\u00f1o episodes have a temporary warming effect, boosting global heat and compounding the impact of long-term climate change.<\/p>\n
That extra heat often helps make the year after El Ni\u00f1o peaks the hottest on record globally.<\/p>\n
Scientists expect 2027 to become a record-setting year but Burgess said 2026 could also prove historic.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe expected 2026 to be top five but now it\u2019s second place, maybe in first place … We\u2019ve seen a striking reminder of how quickly the climate system can shift when multiple drivers have aligned.\u201d<\/p>\n
The double whammy of climate change and El Ni\u00f1o would mean records \u201cfalling over the next six months\u201d, said Burgess, an ocean scientist and strategic lead at ECMWF.<\/p>\n
\u201cClimate change makes every El Ni\u00f1o hotter, and until we stop burning coal, oil, and gas, these record-shattering months will simply keep on coming,\u201d said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist from Imperial College London.<\/p>\n
Extremes <\/p>\n
Copernicus said that western Europe experienced its hottest summer, outstripping the long-standing 2003 record.<\/p>\n
The season was marked by severe, back-to-back heatwaves that shut schools, dried up rivers and primed the land for devastating wildfires.<\/p>\n
Between mid-July and mid-August, the continent\u2019s EuroMomo monitoring platform estimated that Europe saw more than 32,000 excess deaths.<\/p>\n
But it was abnormally hot elsewhere too \u2013 Copernicus said the June to August period was the equal-warmest globally on record, on par with 2024.<\/p>\n
An AFP analysis of Copernicus data showed that regions home to around 900 million people lived through the hottest July ever observed.<\/p>\n
And on Wednesday, NOAA said the contiguous United States has endured its hottest summer on record.<\/p>\n
The summer has been \u201cexceptional\u201d, but the climate will \u201ccontinue to get more extreme unless we turn off the tap to global emissions\u201d, Burgess said.<\/p>\n
– AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"UN climate chief Simon Stiell said the \u201cevidence is irrefutable: this is the spiralling price of humanity\u2019s fossil…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":598274,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[665,806,642,4442,8615,83585,92822,273,22729,6440,11600,9978,31189,8482,61386,4486,111,139,192804,69,97996,8213,312,147,42699,1361,19347,8222,377,40866],"class_list":["post-598273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-around","tag-as","tag-august","tag-climate","tag-come","tag-el","tag-emerges","tag-environment","tag-europes","tag-ever","tag-globally","tag-grows","tag-hottest","tag-huge","tag-monitor","tag-month","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nio","tag-nz","tag-pattern","tag-recorded","tag-says","tag-science","tag-stronger","tag-that","tag-unprecedented","tag-warned","tag-world","tag-worse"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=598273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598273\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/598274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=598273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=598273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=598273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}