August was the joint hottest month on record

August was the joint hottest month ever observed, tying with July 2023, as the most severe super El Niño on record amplified temperatures already heightened by global warming.

The monthly mean temperature was 1.65°C above preindustrial levels, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Humans have not experienced temperatures warmer than this summer in the past 100,000 years, according to Samantha Burgess at Copernicus.

August was also a record warm month for the extra-polar ocean – the regions lying just outside the Arctic and Antarctic circles – peaking at 21.1°C, the hottest temperature ever observed in the sea surface. That included unprecedented temperatures in the tropical Pacific, where winds have slackened and warm waters have been sloshing back toward the eastern Pacific, creating the strong El Niño.

“August 2026 is remarkable not simply because it’s yet another temperature record that’s been broken but because multiple parts of the climate system have reached unprecedented levels at the same time,” she says.

The records will keep being broken as the El Niño intensifies through December, she predicts, with some months likely to be as much 2°C above average.

The record August temperature caps off western Europe’s hottest summer on record. That warmth drives extreme weather and climate catastrophes. It makes heatwaves more likely and allows the atmosphere to hold more moisture, worsening storms.

Four major heatwaves in Europe, and severe drought, fuelled massive wildfires near cities like Bordeaux in France and Madrid in Spain and lowered water levels in major rivers to reveal long-lost woolly mammoth bones and Nazi boats.

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At least 35,000 more people died in Europe during the heatwaves than would be statistically expected, and harvests of crops including wheat are expected to be lower than usual.

The heat in August was also linked to a glacier collapse that destroyed several towns in Nepal and Tibet, with at least 1300 people confirmed dead and more than 5500 still missing.

“For every degree of warming, the extreme events … intensify, so in summer we get more frequent, more intense, more longer-lasting heatwaves,” Burgess says. “This obviously has a direct impact on our food security.”

In light of the temperature record, the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) – a UK-based think tank – called on leaders who will meet in November for the COP31 climate summit to both reverse the rise in greenhouse gas emissions and also invest more in adapting to the current impacts.

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“The task now is to match the scale of the science with the scale of action … accelerating the transition away from coal, oil and gas to bring our climate back into balance,” Gareth Redmond-King, international lead at the ECIU, said in a statement.

The United Nations Environment Programme said this month that the world will “overshoot” the Paris Agreement goal of preventing warming of more than 1.5°C and should now focus on reversing this warming at a later date, including with approaches like carbon dioxide removal.  

“The sooner we can bring temperatures back down, the less time we overshoot, the better it will be for our climate system,” Burgess says.

“I often get asked whether this is the ‘new normal’. The simple answer is no,” Claire Barnes at Imperial College London said in a statement. “Until we stop burning fossil fuels these records will continue to tumble, and the extremes will worsen faster than we are able to adapt.”