The Hottest Summer Ever (Latest Version)

Here are some headlines:

• Congratulations: You Just Survived The Hottest Summer On Earth
• The planet just sizzled through the hottest summer on record
• The world has just experienced the hottest summer on record – by a significant margin
• World just endured its hottest summer on record. UN chief says ‘climate breakdown has begun’

The joke, of course, is that those aren’t new stories. They are all from a year ago, when the summer months shattered records and began what is now more than a year-long hot stretch that is unprecedented in tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. And they are all now out of date.

“The global-average temperature for boreal summer 2024 (June–August) was the highest on record,” says a new analysis from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, launching another smorgasbord of headlines touting — bemoaning? decrying? mourning? — the latest record-setting season. The summer months were 0.69 degrees C above the 1991 to 2020 average, beating out last year’s 0.66 degrees C margin.

Next week NOAA’s analysis will likely echo these findings, with minor variation, and various projections now see 2024 as the likely usurper of 2023’s Hottest Year on Record. Copernicus said that the January through August period was the highest ever seen, and by a fairly huge margin — 0.23 degrees C (a big chunk when we’re talking about global averages) warmer than last year’s same eight-month period. For 2024 to fall out of the top spot, the average anomaly for the rest of the year would need to drop by 0.3 degrees C.

“This has never happened in the entire… dataset,” the agency said, “making it increasingly likely that 2024 is going to be the warmest year on record.”

And depending on where you are, this summer is far from over. The West Coast is currently entirely covered by National Weather Service heat advisories and warnings, and some parts of northern California will see their hottest temperatures in years in the coming days. Globe Remains Warm.

None of this is new, or unexpected, or surprising. Things that are expected, though, can still be shocking: the world is baking in ways that even a few years ago seemed — both scientifically and viscerally or experientially — much farther off. There are reasons for the recent spike, from changes to shipping fuel regulations to El Niño, but also there is a chance things are just changing so rapidly that our models still aren’t quite capturing the reality of our situation.

“We are already in uncharted territory with respect to climate and with every decade we go more further out on a limb,” NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt told The Guardian in August, noting that much of the last year’s warming signal is not readily explained. “We should have better answers by now.”

Summers will have a sort of macabre rhythm to them now: a “hottest day ever recorded on Earth” here, a spike in heat-related mortality there. A collapsing glacier. A power grid calamity. Records falling is normal now, a status quo that doesn’t quite fit its definition. It is an old joke at this point, but apt nonetheless — the coldest summer of the rest of your life, boiling us all alive once more, until the next one.