This week’s temperatures are the highest in 100 years worldwide, says scientist

The planet’s temperature rose again on Thursday (6) to levels not seen in the modern era, marking the fourth consecutive day of record temperatures. These alarming new records are likely the highest temperatures in “at least 100,000 years,” one scientist told CNN.

The global average daily temperature rose to 17.23 degrees Celsius (63.01 degrees Fahrenheit) on Thursday, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, which uses data from the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction.

It was a week of record temperatures. On Monday (10), the average global temperature reached 17.01 degrees Celsius (62.62 degrees Fahrenheit), the highest in NCEP data, which dates back to 1979. On Tuesday (4), it rose to 17.18 degrees Celsius, where it remained in the fourth.

Before this week, the record in the NCEP data was 16.92 degrees Celsius and was set in August 2016.

While this week’s records are not yet official, another global climate monitoring agency has confirmed several in its own data. The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said Monday and Tuesday’s global temperatures were also record highs in its data, which goes back to 1940.

Although the records are based on observational datasets that only go back to the mid-20th century, they are “almost certainly” the hottest temperatures the planet has seen in a much longer period of time, according to Jennifer Francis, senior scientist. senior at Woodwell. Center for Climate Research.

Francis estimated that this week’s temperatures are the warmest “probably going back at least 100,000 years”, calling the records “a huge thing”.

Scientists know this because of the many millennia of climate data extracted from proxies like tree rings, ice cores and coral reefs – data that is the cornerstone for understanding the climate system and how humans contributed to rapid global warming. since the industrial revolution.

Robert Rohde, a lead scientist at Berkeley Earth who was one of the first to share that global temperatures were rising this week, told CNN it’s very likely “we’re going to continue to see more records of these falling” this summer.

July is normally the hottest month on Earth, but temperatures are already on the rise due to the combination of El Niño – a natural weather phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean – and the man-made climate crisis, which is driving global temperatures higher and higher.

“It’s not a record to celebrate and it won’t be a record for long, with the northern hemisphere summer still ahead and El Niño developing,” Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment in UK said earlier this week.

“It just goes to show that we have to stop burning fossil fuels, not in decades now,” Otto said. Temperature records are not just numbers, “but for many people and ecosystems it is a loss of life and livelihoods.”