Temperatures reached unprecedented levels across the planet’s surface in August, according to a report released today by the European meteorological service Copernicus, which notes that this month was the hottest ever recorded on a global scale, while Europe experienced the worst summer in its history.
“August 2026 was a remarkable month in the annals of global climate,” summarized Samantha Berges, a scientist at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), in the Copernicus monthly newsletter.
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“People have likely never experienced temperatures as high as today’s in at least the last 100,000 years,” she added to Agence France-Presse.
From New York to Tokyo, via Rome and New Delhi, the summer of 2026 was marked by extreme temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere, which disrupted the daily lives of delivery workers traveling by bicycle or motorcycle, workers, beachgoers, and even vulnerable people inside their own homes.
With the average air temperature reaching 16.96 °C, August 2026 was the hottest month ever recorded, regardless of season, the institute notes, citing data dating back to 1940.
July 2023 ranks second, at 16.95 °C. Copernicus told AFP that it considers these months to be tied—ex aequo—due to the marginal decimal difference in the measurements.
The period from June through August is also considered the hottest on record globally, tying with that of 2024, according to the European agency, which released these figures one day after the U.S. National Weather Service reported the hottest summer in 130 years in the U.S.
Other climate data sources allow scientists to draw conclusions based on data dating back to a very distant past. As they note, the current period is likely the warmest the Earth has experienced in the last 125,000 years.
“As long as humanity continues to burn colossal amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas, the pollution caused will continue to overheat our planet, and heat waves will continue to shatter records,” said Simon Steele, head of the UN climate agency.
“The solutions are clear,” he continued, referring to a “faster transition to cleaner forms of energy” and “protecting our forests and oceans.”
The El Niño climate phenomenon is also causing ocean temperatures to rise cyclically this year, leading to droughts and floods. Scientists fear that it will exacerbate rising temperatures and extreme weather events.
Climate change “is making every El Niño event more intense, and as long as we continue to burn coal, oil, and gas, these record-breaking months will continue to follow one another,” said Friederike Otto, a professor of climatology at Imperial College London.
Europe Is Overheating
The global average temperature in August was 1.65° higher than the preindustrial average, the Copernicus service also reported, which is well above the most ambitious limit set in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement—a first since November 2025.
During the summer and the heat waves that marked it, the health of billions of people was put to the test. Western Europe experienced “a succession of early, persistent, and intense,” and experienced the hottest summer in its history—hotter even than that of 2003, as the Copernicus Center further noted.
Across the continent, the average atmospheric temperature was 20.26 °C last month—in other words, 1.10 °C above the pre-industrial period. It was the third-warmest summer on record worldwide.
In France, the United Kingdom, and Belgium, meteorological services are announcing one after another that they have recorded a summer with record-breaking temperatures.
More than 30,000 “excess” deaths were recorded by the end of August, according to preliminary data published on the EuroMomo platform, which compiles statistics from 23 European countries and health authorities.
Heat waves also affected the oceans, according to Copernicus. The average monthly ocean surface temperature—excluding the two poles—reached a record high (21.07 ° Celsius), tying the record set in March 2024.
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Source: KYPE
