Summer of 2024 was world's hottest on record, says EU climate change monitor

Unless countries urgently reduce their planet-heating emissions, extreme weather "will only become more intense", she said. Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are the main cause of climate change.

The planet's changed climate continued to fuel 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 is driving a severe ongoing drought on the Italian islands of Sicily and Sardinia, and it intensified Typhoon Gaemi, which tore through the Philippines, Taiwan and China in July, leaving more than 100 people dead.

Human-caused climate change and the El Nino natural weather phenomenon, which warms the surface waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean, both pushed temperatures to record highs earlier in the year.

Copernicus said below-average temperatures in the equatorial Pacific last month indicated a shift to La Nina, which is El Nino's cooler counterpart.

But that didn't prevent unusually high global sea surface temperatures worldwide, with average temperatures in August hotter than in the same month of any other year except for 2023.

C3S' dataset goes back to 1940, which the scientists cross-checked with other data to confirm that this summer was the hottest since the 1850 pre-industrial period.