Records of this kind are repeated, and at an increasingly sustained rate.
The European Copernicus service on climate change reveals this Wednesday that September 2020 was the hottest on the planet.
Temperatures were overall 0.63 ° C above the average for September of the reference period (1981-2010), but also 0.05 ° C above the previous record ... held by September 2019 .
Read also:
The accumulation of heat on Earth is accelerating at a "worrying" rate
Across Europe, average temperatures also climbed to an all-time high, around 0.2 ° C higher than over the same period of 2018, which was the region's previous record.
The south-eastern part of the continent has been particularly affected.
The last month of September marks a new record.
Copernicus
In the Siberian Arctic, the effects of this global warming are particularly visible.
After a summer marked by an unusual heat in its magnitude and persistence (in June, 38 ° C were recorded in the arctic city of Verkhoyansk, unheard of), temperatures continue to be well above average and ice levels are at their second lowest level since satellite data records began in 1979.
Pack ice, in other words the ice that forms on water, partly melts in summer before reforming in winter.
But with climate change, it liquefies more and more in the summer, reaching its annual minimum in September: this year it was the case on the 15th of last month, with 3.74 million square kilometers of ice recorded according to reports. preliminary data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, United States.
"The combination of record temperatures and low sea ice extent in 2020 underlines the importance of improved and more comprehensive monitoring in a region that is warming faster than anywhere else in the world,"
explains Carlo Buontempo, director of the change department. climate change at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), in a statement.
Extreme weather events
After a record decade, which ended with a year 2019 which was the second hottest ever on the planet, the 2020s therefore started on the same trend.
May 2020 was already the hottest month of May.
Read also:
France will experience more and more intense climatic phenomena
Petteri Taalas, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), had warned in January:
“Unfortunately, we expect to see a lot of extreme weather events in 2020 and in the decades to come, fueled by record levels of gas at greenhouse effect that trap heat in the atmosphere. ”