September 2024 was the second warmest September on record, continuing a more than year-long streak of exceptional temperatures that makes “2024 is almost certain to be the hottest year ever measured” ahead of the 2023 record, the European Copernicus Observatory announced on Tuesday, October 8.
These temperatures caused an increase in precipitation throughout the month, the observatory says. “Last month’s extreme precipitation, which we are seeing with increasing frequency, was exacerbated by a warmer atmosphere”leading in places “months of rain in a few days”said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). The monthly newsletter highlights the examples of Storm Boris, synonymous with exceptional flooding in Central Europe, and the monsoon that “severely beaten” Pakistan and Typhoon Krathon, which hit Taiwan and the Philippines in early October.
September was also marked by the devastation of super typhoons Yagi and Bebinca in Asia, deadly flooding in Nepal and Japan, and Hurricane Helene in the United States. In West and Central Africa, an intense rainy season has left more than 1,500 victims, four million affected and 1.2 million displaced, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
1.54°C above pre-industrial era
With a mean temperature of 16.17°C, September was 1.54°C warmer than an average September in the pre-industrial climate (1850-1900). September 2024 is therefore the fourteenth in the last fifteen months to cross the threshold of 1.5°C warming, the most ambitious objective of the 2015 Paris agreement. For the first nine months of the year, 2024 will be 0 .19°C warmer. the same period in 2023, the current annual temperature record.
“The temperature anomaly” during the last three months of the year “it should fall more than 0.4°C so that 2024 is not warmer than 2023”what never happened in the annals of Copernicus, “which makes it almost certain that 2024 will be the hottest year ever measured”says the observatory. Therefore, 2024 has a good chance of being the first year to exceed the 1.5°C threshold in a calendar year. But such an anomaly would have to be observed on average over several decades to consider that the climate, currently warmed by around 1.3°C, has reached this bar.
These incessant records are fueled by the unprecedented overheating of the oceans (70% of the planet), which have absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat caused by human activity and its greenhouse gas emissions: the average temperature on the surface of the seas It has remained at extraordinary temperatures since May 2023.
