World Breaks Hottest Day Record for Second Day in a Row

LONDON (Reuters) - Monday 22 July 2024 was again the hottest day on record, according to preliminary data from a European Union monitoring agency, inching past Sunday 21 July 2024 which had just taken the title. 

The global average surface air temperature rose to 17.15°C — 0.06 °C higher than Sunday's marginal record according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, which has been tracking such patterns since 1940. 

The record had last been set for four consecutive days in a row in early July 2023. Before that, the hottest day was in August 2016. 

"This past Monday might have set a new global record for warmest absolute global average temperature ever - by that I mean going back tens of thousands of years," said climate scientist Karsten Haustein at Leipzig University in Germany. 

In recent days, cities in Japan, Indonesia and China have registered record heat. Gulf countries, too, have sweltered through heat indexes (factoring in humidity) exceeding 60°C. Meanwhile temperatures in parts of Europe have surged past 45°C. 

Climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, is behind the record, scientists said. But unlike last year, which saw climate change combine with the El Niño climate pattern to usher in a new daily record, that is not the case this July. 

Haustein said it was "remarkable" that the record had been breached now the world was well into neutral territory and no longer feeling the impact of El Niño.