An influential climate historian has said that a record 15 national heat records have been broken since the start of this year, as weather extremes grow more frequent and climate breakdown intensifies.
Maximiliano Herrera, who keeps an archive of extreme events said that an additional 130 monthly national temperature records have also been broken, along with tens of thousands of local highs registered at monitoring stations from the Arctic to the South Pacific.
He said that the unprecedented number of records in the first six months was astonishing. “This amount of extreme heat events is beyond anything ever seen or even thought possible before,” he said. “The months from February 2024 to July 2024 have been the most record-breaking for every statistic.”
This is alarming because last year’s extreme heat could be largely attributed to a combination of man-made global heating – caused by burning gas, oil, coal and trees – and a natural El Niño phenomenon, a warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean surface that is associated with higher temperatures in many parts of the world. The El Niño has been fading since February of this year, but this has brought little relief.
“Far from dwindling with the end of El Niño, records are falling at even much faster pace now compared to late 2023,” said Herrera.
New ground is broken every day at a local level. On some days, thousands of monitoring stations set new records of monthly maximums or minimums. The latter is particularly punishing as high night-time temperatures mean people and ecosystems have no time to recover from the relentless heat. In late July, for example, China’s Yueyang region sweltered though an unprecedentedly elevated low of 32C during its dark hours, with dangerously high humidity.
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The geographic range of all-time national records is staggering. Mexico tied its peak of 52C at Tepache on 20 June. On the other side of the world, the Australian territory of Cocos Islands tied its all-time high with 32.8C on 7 April for the third time this year.
But the fiercest heat has concentrated on the tropics. On 7 June, Egypt registered a national high of 50.9C at Aswan. Two days before that Chad tied its national record of 48C at Faya. On 1 May, Ghana hit a new peak of 44.6C at Navrong, while Laos entered new heat territory with 43.7C at Tha Ngon. Herrera said the tropics had set records every day for 15 months in a row.
Herrera, a Costa Rican who has been monitoring climate records for 35 years, fills an important gap in global temperature monitoring. Since 2007, international records are archived by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which organises expert panels to scrutinise each one in a time-consuming process. Meanwhile, national and subnational records are updated hourly or daily by a plethora of different organisations. Herrera brings the latter together rapidly, double-checks with local sources, and maintains updates on his Extreme Temperatures Around the World X account.
His findings are in line with, and often ahead of, big institutions, all of which are warning of a rapidly heating world.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
