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    It’s Been the Hottest Summer on Record, European Officials Say

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    The excessive heat worldwide suggests the full year will also be a record-breaker, according to Copernicus, the E.U. agency that tracks global warming.The summer of “brat,” the Paris Olympics and political conventions may be winding down, but the heat in 2024 is still going strong.The southwestern United States’ sizzling triple-digit temperatures this week mark the tail end of the hottest summer on record, according to a new European climate report.“We know that the warming of the planet leads to more intense and extreme climate events, and what we’ve seen this summer has been no exception,” said Julien Nicolas, a climatologist with the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the European Union agency that published the assessment on Wednesday.Since 2018, the agency has been combining data like weather observations from balloons and satellites with computer models that simulate temperature and precipitation to get a picture of what’s happening around the world. It pairs that picture with past weather conditions reconstructed back to 1940 to compute a global average temperature.June and August were the hottest June and August on record, according to the models, while July is not quite as clear.The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, based in the United States, found that this July was three-hundredths of a Celsius degree hotter than July 2023, while Copernicus determined it was a few hundredths of a degree cooler than last year. For all practical purposes, that created a virtual tie, according to Karin Gleason of NOAA, speaking recently about her department’s findings.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Planet Sets Record for Hottest Day Twice in a Row

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      Researchers with the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said Sunday was Earth’s hottest day. Then it happened again on Monday.Monday was most likely the hottest day ever recorded on Earth, with a global average of about 62.87 degrees Fahrenheit, or 17.15 degrees Celsius, preliminary data showed — beating a record that had been set just one day before.The data, released on Wednesday by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, a European Union institution that provides information about the past, present and future climate, caused alarm among some experts.Earlier this week, the service announced that Sunday had set a record, with a global average of about 62.76 degrees Fahrenheit, or 17.09 degrees Celsius. A day later it announced that Monday was the hottest day since at least 1940, when records began.Before this week’s back-to-back records, the previous record, 62.74 degrees Fahrenheit, or 17.08 degrees Celsius, was set last year, on July 6, besting a record that stood since 2016.Since Sunday’s and Monday’s temperatures were averages, some portions of the globe felt that extra heat more strongly, like parts of the Western United States where an excessive heat warning has been in place for days and is expected to continue for much of the week.“What is truly staggering is how large the difference is between the temperature of the last 13 months and the previous temperature records,” Carlo Buontempo, the director of the service, said in a news release announcing Sunday’s record. “We are now in truly uncharted territory and as the climate keeps warming, we are bound to see new records being broken in future months and years.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Winter Heat Waves and Hottest Ocean Ever

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      Recent heat waves in cities worldwide have the hallmarks of global warming, researchers said. And last month was the hottest February on record.Winter was weirdly warm for half the world’s population, driven in many places by the burning of fossil fuels, according to an analysis of temperature data from hundreds of locations worldwide.That aligns with the findings published late Wednesday by the European Union’s climate monitoring organization, Copernicus: The world as a whole experienced the hottest February on record, making it the ninth consecutive month of record temperatures. Even more startling, global ocean temperatures in February were at an all-time high for any time of year, according to Copernicus.Taken together, the two sets of figures offer a portrait of an unequivocally warming world that, combined with a natural El Niño weather pattern this year, has made winter unrecognizable in some places.The first analysis, conducted by Climate Central, an independent research group based in New Jersey, found that in several cities in North America, Europe and Asia, not only was winter unusually warm, but climate change played a distinctly recognizable role.Climate Central looked at anomalies in December and January temperature data in 678 cities worldwide and asked: How important are the fingerprints of climate change for these unusual temperatures? That is to say, its researchers tried to isolate the usual variability of the weather from the influence of climate change.“There’s the temperature,” said Andrew Pershing, Climate Central’s vice-president for science, “and then there’s our ability to really detect that climate signal in the data.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      January Temperatures Hit Record Highs on Land and at Sea

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      On the heels of Earth’s warmest year, January was the eighth month in a row in which global temperatures blew past previous records.The exceptional warmth that first enveloped the planet last summer is continuing strong into 2024: Last month clocked in as the hottest January ever measured, the European Union climate monitor announced on Thursday. More