Summer 2024 was the Earth's warmest on record - except in Scotland

Summer 2024 sweltered to Earth’s hottest on record, making it more likely that this year will end up as the warmest on record, European climate service Copernicus said on Friday - despite a colder than usual summer season in Scotland and the rest of the UK.

The records were set just last year with a temporary boost from an El Nino dialling up temperatures and extreme weather, scientists said.

This year, northern meteorological summer — June, July and August — averaged 16.8C, according to Copernicus.

That is 0.03C warmer than the old record in 2023.

The UK, however, experienced its coolest summer since 2015. Data released earlier this week by the Met Office showed Scotland - as well as parts of the north of England - saw much higher rainfall, less sunshine, and cooler temperatures on average, according to the provisional data. Copernicus records go back to 1940, but American, British and Japanese records, which start in the mid-19th century, show the last decade has been the hottest since regular measurements were taken and likely in about 120,000 years, according to some scientists.

The last two Augusts tied for the hottest globally at 16.8C. July was the first time in more than a year that a month did not set a record, but because June 2024 was so much hotter than June 2023, this summer as a whole was the hottest, Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo said.

Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Ima

The dew point — one of several ways to measure the air’s humidity — probably was at or near record high this summer for much of the world, Mr Buontempo said.

Until last month Mr Buontempo, like some other climate scientists, was on the fence over whether 2024 would smash the hottest year record set last year, mostly because August 2023 was so enormously hotter than average. But after August 2024 matched 2023, Mr Buontempo is “pretty certain” this year will end up the hottest on record.

“In order for 2024 not to become the warmest on record, we need to see very significant landscape cooling for the remaining few months, which doesn’t look likely at this stage,” he said.

With a forecasted La Nina — a temporary natural cooling of parts of the central Pacific — the last four months of the year may no longer be record-setters like most of the past year and a half, but it is not likely cool enough to keep 2024 from breaking the annual record, Mr Buontempo said.

These are not just numbers in a record book, but weather that hurts people, climate scientists said.

Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Centre in Cape Cod, said there has been a deluge of extreme weather of heat, floods, wildfires and high winds that are violent and dangerous.

“Like people living in a war zone with the constant thumping of bombs and clatter of guns, we are becoming deaf to what should be alarm bells and air-raid sirens,” Ms Francis said.