August ties July 2023 for temperature record
August became one of the two hottest months on record: the average global surface air temperature reached 16.96 °C. This is 1.65 °C above the 19th-century average, before the large-scale burning of coal, oil and gas began, Daily Maverick reports, citing the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
According to C3S, August tied July 2023 as the warmest month in the global temperature record. It also became the first month since November 2025 when the average global temperature exceeded the 1.5 °C mark compared with the pre-industrial level.
The Paris Agreement threshold
A temporary exceedance of 1.5 °C does not mean that the world has already surpassed the long-term target of the Paris climate agreement. It concerns the average warming level over decades, while the long-term level of global warming currently stands at around 1.4 °C.
The article notes that nearly 200 countries committed in 2015 to try to prevent this threshold from being exceeded in order to avoid the most severe consequences of climate change. Emissions from burning fossil fuels are named as the main cause of climate change.
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C3S records have been kept since 1940 and are compared with global temperature data dating back to 1850.
Heat, droughts and fires
Extreme weather events were recorded in different parts of the world in August. Scientists believe climate change likely influenced landslides and flash floods in Nepal and China’s Tibet, where hundreds of people died, although details are still being studied. Wildfires intensified from Indonesia to Greece and Belgium, while Hungary and Romania suffered severe drought.
Sea surface temperatures outside the polar regions also matched the highest figure for any month on record, C3S said. In the tropical Pacific, record temperatures are linked to the formation of the El Niño weather phenomenon, which is forecast to intensify in the coming months.
