The EU’s climate monitor said on Thursday that August was the hottest month ever recorded globally, with ocean temperatures also reaching unprecedented highs as Western Europe capped its warmest summer.
Responding to the assessment by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the UN warned that until humanity weaned itself off fossil fuels, the planet would only be pushed deeper into uncharted territory.
Copernicus observations go back to 1940, but other evidence, such as ice cores, tree rings and coral skeletons, allows scientists to place today’s climate within 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 of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which oversees Copernicus, told AFP.
Global average air temperatures in August reached 16.96°C, Copernicus said, surpassing by 0.01°C the previous all-time monthly record set in July 2023. Given the narrow difference, Copernicus said it considered the two months jointly the hottest on record.
Scientists say the burning of fuels such as coal, oil and gas has warmed the planet by roughly 1.4°C 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 spiralling price of humanity’s fossil fuel addiction, and the global climate crisis it is fuelling,” UN climate chief Simon Stiell said of the Copernicus report.
More heat ahead
Global sea surface temperatures also set a new daily high and tied the record for the hottest August, extending a three-month streak of record-breaking warmth across the world’s oceans.
More than 90 per cent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions has been absorbed by the oceans, sparing the land from further warming but at a severe cost to marine life, reefs and coastal communities.
Records tumbled in overheated basins such as the Atlantic and Mediterranean, as well as in the tropical Pacific, where the strongest El Nino weather pattern of the modern era is rapidly gaining strength.
El Nino events are marked by unusually warm Pacific waters but raise the likelihood of extreme weather thousands of miles away, from floods in Peru and droughts in Africa to wildfires in Australia.
As the warmer phase of a natural climate cycle, El Nino episodes usually deliver a temporary spike in global temperatures already elevated by long-term warming.
Scientists expect records to keep falling in the months ahead as this “super” El Nino approaches peak intensity around December. They expect 2027, and possibly even 2026, to become the hottest years ever recorded.
“Climate change makes every El Nino hotter, and until we stop burning coal, oil and gas, these record-shattering months will simply keep on coming,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London.
Sizzling summer
Copernicus also said August “marked the end of Western Europe’s warmest summer”, surpassing the long-standing record set in 2003.
The June-to-August season was defined by severe, back-to-back heatwaves that shut schools, dried up rivers and primed the land for devastating wildfires.
Between mid-July and mid-August, Europe recorded more than 32,000 excess deaths, according to estimates from the continent’s EuroMomo monitoring platform.
Scientists from the World Weather Attribution network concluded that a particularly intense heatwave in June would have been “virtually impossible” without the influence of climate change.
But extraordinary heat was felt around the globe.
On Wednesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the contiguous United States had endured its hottest summer on record.
Regions home to around 900 million people also experienced the hottest July ever recorded, according to an AFP analysis of Copernicus data.
“We’ve had an exceptional summer, not only in Europe, but in other parts of the world where records that have existed for close to a century have fallen,” said Burgess, an ocean scientist and strategic lead at ECMWF.
The climate would “continue to get more extreme unless we turn off the tap to global emissions”, she added.
