August was world’s joint hottest month on record, also the warmest August ever: EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service

NEW DELHI: August 2026 was the joint-warmest month ever recorded globally across all calendar months, on a par with July 2023, said Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) of the European Union’s space programme on Thursday.It noted that this August was 1.65 degrees Celsius above the estimated pre-industrial (1850-1900) baseline, marking the first month above 1.5 degrees Celsius since Nov 2025, and the period from June to August 2026 was the joint-warmest three-month period on record globally, on a par with 2024.“August 2026 was a remarkable month in the global climate record. It was both the warmest August and the warmest month ever recorded,” said Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate at European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).Though the global average temperature rise in the month breached the limit of 1.5 degrees C, it technically did not cross the Paris Agreement threshold, which actually refers to long-term temperature increase over decades, not over one to five years.Under the Paris Agreement, countries agreed to keep long-term global average surface temperature well below 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees C by the end of this century.Nevertheless, the rise in temperatures to this level in August is a stark warning that the world is getting warmer with its consequences of extreme weather events, glacier melt, sea-level rise and uneven distribution of rainfall over a short period of time being visible all around the globe.“Until humanity stops burning colossal amount of coal, oil and gas, the pollution this causes will keep baking our planet, and extreme heat will keep smashing all-time records, killing millions and costing trillions, hitting transport and health systems, and pushing up prices for household basics like food,” said UN Climate Change executive secretary Simon Stiell, in his response to the Copernicus report.Incidentally, August in India was the warmest August in the country since 1901, with a mean monthly temperature of 28.01 degrees Celsius. Globally, the average surface air temperature in August was 16.96 degrees C, 0.85 degrees C above the 1991–2020 average.Catch the latest World News and Live updates. Download the TOI app.