This summer was the hottest on record worldwide, outpacing even last year’s blistering temperatures, according to a new report by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
“During the past three months of 2024, the globe has experienced the hottest June and August, the hottest day on record, and the hottest boreal summer on record. This string of record temperatures is increasing the likelihood of 2024 being the hottest year on record,” the climate service’s deputy director, Samantha Burgess, said in a statement last week.
While the Texas summer was slightly cooler this year because of rainfall from storms like Hurricane Beryl, it is still on track to be the state’s sixth-hottest on record, said John Nielsen-Gammon, the state’s climatologist and a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. This year will also likely be the state’s sixth-hottest on record.
“Temperatures every season have been going up a little bit more than a half degree Fahrenheit per decade in Texas, at least for the past half-century, and it’s been a fairly steady increase,” he said.
In the new report by Copernicus, the average temperature in the Northern hemisphere in June, July and August was 16.8 degrees Celsius (or 62.24 degrees Fahrenheit). This puts the summer of 2024 at 0.03 degrees Celsius (0.05 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than the summer of 2023, which was the second-hottest on record for Texas and third-hottest for Dallas-Fort Worth.
While this July and last July were nearly tied, temperature-wise, this June and August were the hottest on record worldwide. The average temperature in August was 0.71 degrees Celsius (1.28 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1991 to 2020 average for the month, Copernicus found.
The global average temperature for the past 12 months — between September 2023 and August 2024 — is the highest on record for any 12-month period: 0.76 degrees Celsius (1.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1991 to 2020 average and 1.64 degrees Celsius (nearly 3 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, Copernicus also found.
The climate monitoring service’s dataset goes back to 1940. But records from the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan dating to the mid-19th century suggest that the past decade has been the hottest in about 120,000 years.
Temperatures are expected to rise more dramatically in Texas compared to the rest of the world, according to Nielsen-Gammon.
“The general expectation, based on historical trends, climate model simulations and our physical understanding [of the environment], is that Texas temperatures should increase faster than global temperatures by about 20% to 30%,” he said.
That’s partly because global temperatures take into account the Earth’s oceans, which don’t warm as quickly as land. Also affecting temperatures is the urban heat island effect, where cities like Dallas experience higher temperatures because urban surfaces absorb and emit more heat, Nielsen-Gammon said.
The news comes at a time when heat-related deaths in the United States are on the rise. A recent study found that these deaths have doubled over the past 24 years, with about 48% occurring in four southwestern states, including Texas, the paper’s lead author Jeffrey Howard, an associate professor in public health at the University of Texas at San Antonio, told The New York Times in August.
Last year in Texas, 365 people died directly due to heat and 562 people died when heat was a contributing cause, according to an analysis of state records by The Texas Tribune. The report added that heat-related deaths are almost certainly undercounted in Texas and nationwide.
Rising temperatures are especially threatening for older adults, young children, pregnant people and people with certain medical conditions. The rise in temperatures is also concerning for infrastructures like the state’s power grid, which can be heavily strained by energy demands during heat waves.
“The temperature-related extreme events witnessed this summer will only become more intense,” Burgess, of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said, “with more devastating consequences for people and the planet unless we take urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
Miriam Fauzia is a science reporting fellow at The Dallas Morning News. Her fellowship is supported by the University of Texas at Dallas. The News makes all editorial decisions.
