Picture taken on August 14, 2026 with a drone shows the Pfalzgrafenstein Castle on an island in the dried-up river Rhine in Kaub, western Germany. (AFP Photo)
The EU’s climate monitor said on Sept. 10 that August was the hottest single month ever recorded globally, with ocean temperatures also reaching unprecedented highs as western Europe capped its warmest summer.
In response to the assessment by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the U.N. warned that until humanity weaned off fossil fuels, the planet would only push deeper into uncharted territory.
Copernicus observations go back to 1940 but other evidence, such as ice cores, tree rings and coral skeletons, allow scientists to place today’s climate against a much longer historical context.
“Humans haven’t seen temperatures as hot as today for, arguably, at least the last 100,000 years,” Samantha Burgess from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which oversees Copernicus, told AFP.
Global average air temperatures in August were 16.96 degrees Celsius, Copernicus said, surpassing by 0.01 degrees the previous all-time monthly record set in July 2023. Copernicus said it considered the two months joint-highest given the narrow difference.
Scientists say that human activity, primarily the burning of coal, oil and gas, has warmed the planet by roughly 1.4 degrees since pre-industrial times and increased the severity and likelihood of extreme weather.
Yet heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions rose to new highs in 2025.
“The evidence is irrefutable: This is the spiraling price of humanity’s fossil fuel addiction, and the global climate crisis it is fueling,” United Nations climate chief Simon Stiell said of the Copernicus report.
Global sea surface temperatures also set a new daily high and tied equal-hottest for August, extending a three-month streak of record-breaking warmth across the world’s oceans.
More than 90 percent of excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions has been absorbed by the oceans, sparing land from warming but at severe cost to marine life, reefs and coastal communities.
Records tumbled in overheated basins like the Atlantic and Mediterranean and also the tropical Pacific, where the strongest El Nino weather pattern in the modern era is fast accumulating strength.
Scientists expect records to keep falling in the months ahead as this “super” El Nino approaches peak intensity around December and for 2027, and maybe even 2026, to become the hottest years ever observed.
Copernicus also said that August “marked the end of western Europe’s warmest summer” that surpassed the long-standing record set in 2003.
The June to August season was defined by severe, back-to-back heat waves that shut schools, dried up rivers and primed the land for devastating wildfires.
Between mid-July and mid-August, the continent’s EuroMomo monitoring platform estimated that Europe saw more than 32,000 excess deaths.
