August 2026 has tied for the hottest month ever, sharing the record with July 2023, according to new data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
The global surface air temperature for August was 16.96 degrees Celsius, or 62.53 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s the warmest August ever recorded and some 1.65 degrees C above the preindustrial average. That exceeds the 1.5- degree-C increase that the Paris Agreement once identified as the tipping point for irreversible damage from global warming. The United Nations admitted last week that consistently surpassing that threshold is now “unavoidable.”
That temperature statistically matches the previous record, which was set in July 2023 at 16.95 degrees C, or 62.51 degrees F.
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Amanda Montañez; Source: Copernicus Climate Change Service (data)
World ocean temperatures this August also tied with March 2024 for the highest on record across all months. Western Europe and the U.S. had their hottest summers overall, according to Copernicus and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data.
The record may come as no surprise after a summer marked by extreme weather, from wildfires to floods, and on the cusp of what scientists believe will be a historic El Niño. This cyclic climate phenomenon drives up temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, altering the world’s climate and weather patterns for months. Together, these factors all likely contributed to August’s record-breaking heat—but human-driven climate change is the main cause of extreme temperatures and is only set to accelerate.
Marc Alessi, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, noted in a statement to Scientific American that “this El Niño is occurring on top of a changed climate from the burning of fossil fuels.” Indeed, scientists believe that, regardless of whether 2026 breaks the record for hottest year ever, 2027 almost certainly will do so because of the El Niño conditions.
“We now live in a completely different climate than the one that existed 50 years ago,” he said.
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