Last month was officially the hottest May on record
Last month was officially the hottest May on record going back to 1940, the EU's climate change program has revealed. The global average temperature for May 2024 was 60.6°F (15.91°C), which is 0.34°F (0.19°C) above the temperature of the previous warmest May, in 2020.
Worryingly, this is also 1.17°F (0.65°C) warmer than the 1991-2020 global average for May – and the experts point to greenhouse gas emissions as the cause. May 2024 also marks the 12th consecutive record-breaking month, with every month since June 2023 being the hottest ever recorded.
Dr Samantha Burgess, director of the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), said the climate 'continues to alarm us'. She pointed to global warming and El Nino – the unusual warming of surface waters in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean.
'The last 12 months have broken records like never before – caused primarily by our greenhouse gas emissions and an added boost from the El Niño event in the tropical Pacific,' Dr Burgess said. 'Until we reach net-zero global emissions the climate will continue to warm, will continue to break records, and will continue to produce even more extreme weather events.
'If we choose to continue to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere then 2023/4 will soon look like a cool year, in a similar way to how 2015/6 now appears.' It follows confirmation from the Met Office that the UK had its warmest May and warmest spring on record, despite being 'wet and dull'. But this new reading from the EU is an average for the entire world and therefore gives a bigger picture of how the planet's overall temperature is changing.
C3S, managed by the European Commission, looks at temperature readings based on a variety of platforms and instruments, from weather stations to weather balloons and satellites. The department's readings refer to the average air temperature for the whole planet over the whole year – so lower than a single typically 'hot' temperature reading. According to C3S, May 2024 was 2.73°F (1.52°C) above the estimated May average for 1850-1900, the designated pre-industrial reference period.
What's more, the global average temperature for the past 12 months (June 2023 to May 2024) is now the highest on record. The past 12 months have been 1.35F (0.75°C) above the average between 1991 and 2020 and 2.93°F (1.63°C) above the pre-industrial average of 1850 to 1900, the department said. Looking at Europe separately from the rest of the world, temperatures last month were 1.58°F (0.88°C) above the 1991-2020 average for May – making May 2024 the third-warmest May on record for Europe.
CS3 said much of the Iberian Peninsula, southwest Turkey and a large region across Eastern Europe, including southern Scandinavia and the Baltic countries, were drier than average last month. But May 2024 was wetter than average over much of Iceland, UK and Ireland, central and most of south-eastern Europe, north of Iberian Peninsula and western Russia.
Globally, drier-than-average regions included south-western and parts of inland US and Canada , west of the Caspian Sea, across central Asia and southernmost China , regions of Australia, most of South America and southern Africa. CS3 also revealed that the the global average sea surface temperature (another metric that measures heat close to the ocean's surface) was 20.93°C last month, the highest value on record for the month of May.
