Record Breakers

For the month of August, the Green Team explores our changing climate and steps taken from the national to local levels to find solutions. Let’s start this week with the current global conditions. On July 22 nd 2024, the daily global average temperature reached a new record high, exceeding the previous record set just one day before. By the end of the week, the planet experienced the four hottest days ever observed by scientists. Almost 2,000 weather stations around the planet notched new daily high temperature records, with almost half of the planet experiencing at least one day of “exceptional heat”. These broken records come after 13 straight months of unprecedented high temperatures. Researchers project that 2024 will end as the hottest year on record, exceeding the benchmark set in 2023, coming on top of a very large, decades-long warming trend. Natural drivers of climate cannot explain the recent observed warming. Over the last five decades, natural factors (solar forcing and volcanoes) alone would actually have led to a slight cooling. The majority of the warming at the global scale over the past 50 years can only be explained by the effects of human influences, especially the emissions from burning fossil fuels and from deforestation.