The heat reached levels never seen in August on the planet, the European meteorological service Copernicus noted on Thursday, with the hottest month ever measured on a global scale and the worst summer for Western Europe.
“August 2026 was a remarkable month in global climate history,” commented Samantha Burgess, scientist at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), cited in a monthly Copernicus report drawing up these findings on Thursday. “Humans have not experienced temperatures as high as today for, in all likelihood, at least 100,000 years,” she added, interviewed by AFP.
From New York to Tokyo, via Rome and New Delhi, the summer of 2026 was marked by extreme temperatures throughout the northern hemisphere, disrupting the daily lives of bicycle delivery workers, workers on construction sites, vacationers on beaches, or simply vulnerable people at home.
16.96°C
With 16.96°C average air temperature, August 2026 is the hottest month ever measured, all months combined, calculated Copernicus, whose data dates back to 1940. In second place is July 2023 with 16.95°C. Copernicus specifies to AFP that it places the two “ex aequo”, due to the very fine margin separating these two measurements.
The period from June to August is also considered the hottest ever recorded on a global scale, tied with 2024, specifies Copernicus the day after the announcement by the American meteorological agency of the hottest summer recorded in more than 130 years of records in the country.
Other sources of climate data allow scientists to support their conclusions by relying on elements dating from a much more distant time. According to them, the current period is probably the warmest that the Earth has experienced in the last 125,000 years.
“As long as humanity continues to burn colossal quantities of coal, oil and gas, the pollution generated will continue to overheat our planet, and extreme heat waves will continue to shatter absolute records,” reacted Thursday the head of the UN Climate, Simon Stiell, in a statement sent to AFP.
“The solutions are just as clear,” he continued, citing in particular “a faster transition to clean energy” and “the protection of our forests and the ocean”.
The El Niño climate phenomenon is also causing ocean temperatures to rise cyclically this year, causing droughts and floods. Scientists fear it will worsen warming, while amplifying extreme weather events.
“Climate change is making every El Niño event hotter, and as long as we continue to burn coal, oil and gas, these record-shattering months will just keep coming,” said Friederike Otto, professor of climatology at Imperial College London.
Europe overheating
The global average temperature in August was 1.65°C higher than the average of pre-industrial levels, Copernicus also notes, i.e. more than the most ambitious limit set during the Paris climate agreement in 2015, for the first time since November 2025. But this limit of 1.5°C is for its part averaged over many years.
During this scorching summer which affected the bodies of billions of individuals, Western Europe went through “a succession of exceptionally early, persistent and intense heat waves”, and recorded the hottest summer in its history, ahead of that of 2003, Copernicus also notes.
Across the continent, the average air temperature was 20.26°C in August, 1.10°C above the pre-industrial period, the third hottest summer on record.
France, United Kingdom, Belgium… Meteorological agencies have followed one another in recent weeks to announce a record summer. More than 30,000 excess deaths were also recorded according to provisional data published by the EuroMomo platform, which includes statistical feedback from 23 European countries, and by health authorities at the end of August.
Heat waves also largely affected the oceans, notes Copernicus, with the monthly average surface temperature of the oceans outside the polar regions having been the highest ever recorded, tied with March 2024.
