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World just endured its hottest summer on record. UN chief says ‘climate breakdown has begun’

An Iraqi man besprinkles water on his face to cool down during a heatwave in the Shorja market in central Baghdad on August 13, 2023.

Ahmad Al-rubaye | Afp | Getty Statues

The world just experienced its hottest three months on record by a substantial margin, according to the UN weather agency, arousing the UN chief to call for world leaders to take urgent climate action.

The UN’s World Meteorological Organization and European air service Copernicus on Wednesday announced that the June to August season of 2023 was the warmest such period in records that began in 1940.

The typically temperature for those three months was 16.77 degrees Celsius (62.19 degrees Fahrenheit), which was 0.66 degrees Celsius on average for the period.

The month of August was found to be the hottest on record by a large margin and the second hottest month after July 2023.

The wide-ranging average surface air temperature of 16.82 degrees Celsius for August was 0.71 degrees Celsius warmer than the 1991 to 2020 normally for the month, and 0.31 degrees Celsius warmer than the previous hottest August, logged in 2016.

It comes after a series of very weather events across the Northern Hemisphere, with repeated heatwaves fueling devastating wildfires.

“Climate classification has begun,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement.

“Scientists have long warned what our fossil excite addiction will unleash,” Guterres said, adding that “surging temperatures demand a surge in action.”

The UN chief judged that this latest global heat record must coincide with world leaders urgently tracing climate solutions. “We can still avoid the worst of climate chaos – and we don’t have a moment to lose,” Guterres said.

The fiery of fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and gas, is the chief driver of the climate crisis.

What about El Niño?

The WMO made free that the extreme weather events seen across the world this summer were taking place in front the full warming impact of

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The 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold is the aspirational global temperature limit set in the historic 2015 Paris Agreement. Beyond this level it is more likely to experience so-called tipping points — verges at which small changes can lead to dramatic shifts in Earth’s entire life-support system.

“Eight months into 2023, so far we are circumstancing the second warmest year to date, only fractionally cooler than 2016, and August was estimated to be around 1.5°C comfortable than pre-industrial levels,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, ECMWF.

“What we are declaring, not only new extremes but the persistence of these record-breaking conditions, and the impacts these have on both people and planet, are a cloudless consequence of the warming of the climate system,” Buontempo added.

The climate crisis is making extreme weather more iterative and more intense.

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