The news comes as the El Nino climate phenomenon has officially arrived, raising fears of extreme weather and more temperature records.
“The world has just experienced its warmest early June on record, following a month of May that was less than 0.1 degrees Celsius cooler than the warmest May on record,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).
“Global-mean surface air temperatures for the first days of June 2023 were the highest in the ERA5 data record for early June by a substantial margin”, said Copernicus. Some of the unit’s data goes back as far as 1950.
Copernicus recently announced that global oceans were warmer last month than in any other May on record.
The unit also said that at the beginning of June, global temperatures exceeded pre-industrial levels by more than 1.5C (34.7 degrees Fahrenheit), which is the most ambitious cap for global warming in the 2015 Paris Agreement. According to the data, the daily global average temperature was at or above the 1.5C threshold between June 7-11, reaching a maximum of 1.69C above it on June 9. While it is the first time the cap has been breached in June, this limit has been exceeded several times in winter and spring in recent years.
“Every single fraction of a degree matters to avoid even more severe consequences of the climate crisis”, Burgess said.
Copernicus is based in the Germany city Bonn, where UN-led climate talks are taking place ahead of the COP28 climate summit scheduled to take place in Dubai at the end of the year.
Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said human-caused warming will be exacerbated by an event that typically adds between 0.1-0.2 degrees to the overall global temperature.
“The global surface temperature anomaly is at or near record levels right now, and 2023 will almost certainly be the warmest year on record,” the Guardian quoted Mann as saying.
“That is likely to be true for just about every El Nino year in the future as well, as long as we continue to warm the planet with fossil fuel burning and carbon pollution.”
Mika Rantanen, a Finnish meteorologist, said that the spiking heat so far this month is “extraordinary” and that it is “pretty certain” it will result in a record warm June, the Guardian reported.