August 2026 tied as the joint-hottest month ever recorded globally, matching the previous high set in July 2023. According to the European climate monitor Copernicus, rising ocean temperatures and a strengthening El Niño drove the extreme heat, pushing global temperatures back above 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels.
Global Temperatures and the 1.5C Threshold
Global average air temperatures in August reached 16.96C, surpassing by 0.01C the previous all-time monthly record set in July 2023. Copernicus said it considered the two months joint-highest given the narrow difference. The reading pushed global temperatures back above 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels, according to data from Copernicus. Copernicus observations go back to 1940, but other evidence such as ice cores, tree rings, and coral skeletons allow scientists to place today’s climate against a much longer historical context.
Humans haven't seen temperatures as hot as today for, arguably, at least the last 100,000 years,
Samantha Burgess from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which oversees Copernicus, told AFP. Scientists say that human activity—primarily the burning of coal, oil, and gas—has warmed the planet by roughly 1.4C since pre-industrial times and increased the severity and likelihood of extreme weather.
Simon Stiell, United Nations climate chief
The evidence is irrefutable: this is the spiralling price of humanity's fossil fuel addiction, and the global climate crisis it is fuelling,
United Nations climate chief Simon Stiell said of the Copernicus report. Yet heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions rose to new highs. Global greenhouse gas emissions from human activities last year rose 0.7 percent to reach a record 54 billion tons of CO2 equivalent, the European Commission said Monday—an annual rate that would likely lock in 1.5 degrees of warming by the end of the decade. The United States led the upward trend, increasing its climate pollution by 2.2 percent in 2025. In China, the world’s top climate polluter, emissions rose 0.1 percent in 2025, while in India they fell 0.2 percent. The EU’s emissions also fell by 0.2 percent in 2025, the Commission said.
Ocean Heatwaves and the Rising El Niño
Global sea surface temperatures also set a new daily high and tied equal-hottest for August, extending a three-month streak of record-breaking warmth across the world’s oceans. More than 90 percent of excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions has been absorbed by the oceans, sparing land from warming but at severe cost to marine life, reefs, and coastal communities. Records tumbled in overheated basins like the Atlantic and Mediterranean and also the tropical Pacific, where the strongest El Niño weather pattern in the modern era is fast accumulating strength.
El Niño is a natural climate pattern in which a band of the eastern Pacific turns unusually warm, releasing vast amounts of stored ocean heat into the atmosphere and nudging global temperatures upwards for around a year. The one currently being experienced is still strengthening and could become one of the most powerful on record, according to the Copernicus team. The biggest impact of this natural phenomenon on global temperatures is expected to hit over the coming year, meaning the current run of records may have further to go. As this “super” El Niño approaches peak intensity around December, scientists expect that 2027—and maybe even 2026—could become the hottest years ever observed.
Friederike Otto, climate scientist from Imperial College London
Climate change makes every El Niño hotter, and until we stop burning coal, oil, and gas these record-shattering months will simply keep on coming, Friederike Otto
Western Europe’s Warmest Summer and Alpine Melt
Copernicus also said that August marked the end of western Europe’s warmest summer that surpassed the long-standing record set in 2003. The June to August season was defined by severe, back-to-back heatwaves that shut schools, dried up rivers, and primed the land for devastating wildfires. Between mid-July and mid-August, the continent’s EuroMomo monitoring platform estimated that Europe saw more than 32,000 excess deaths. Scientists from the World Weather Attribution network concluded that a particularly strong heatwave in June would have been virtually impossible without the influence of climate change.
In Italy, glaciologists say that heat is accelerating the retreat of Alpine glaciers, with one Lombardy glacier losing 31 metres this year and some monitoring delayed because the melt season hasn’t yet ended. Across the Atlantic, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the contiguous United States has endured its hottest summer on record, while regions home to around 900 million people lived through the hottest July ever observed, according to AFP analysis of Copernicus data.
Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts
We've had an exceptional summer—not only in Europe, but other parts of the world where records that have existed for close to a century have fallen,
said Burgess, an ocean scientist and strategic lead for climate at ECMWF. The climate would continue to get more extreme unless we turn off the tap to global emissions
, she added. Dr Samantha Burgess described August as a remarkable month in the global climate record, noting its impacts had been increasingly felt by communities, economies, and ecosystems across the world. The combination of record air temperatures, record ocean heat, and Europe’s exceptional summer showed how climate change was now driving extremes across both the atmosphere and the oceans.
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