AVERAGE GLOBAL TEMPERATURES at the start of June were the warmest the European Union’s climate monitoring unit has ever recorded for the period.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service said the figures trounced previous records by a “substantial margin”.

The news comes as the El Nino climate phenomenon has officially arrived, raising fears of extreme weather and more temperature records.

“The world has just experienced its warmest early June on record, following a month of May that was less than 0.1 degrees Celsius cooler than the warmest May on record,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).

“Global-mean surface air temperatures for the first days of June 2023 were the highest in the ERA5 data record for early June by a substantial margin,” Copernicus said.

Some of the unit’s data goes back as far as 1950.

Copernicus recently announced that global oceans were warmer last month than in any other May on record.

The unit said that on 8 and 9 June this year, the global average daily temperature was about 0.4C warmer than previous records for the same days.

It also said that at the beginning of June, global temperatures exceeded pre-industrial levels by more than 1.5C, which is the most ambitious cap for global warming in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

According to the data, the daily global average temperature was at or above the 1.5C threshold between 7-11 June, reaching a maximum of 1.69C above it on 9 June.

While it is the first time the cap has been breached in June, this limit has been exceeded several times in winter and spring in recent years.

Gerald Fleming is the former head of forecasting at Met Éireann and is now a consultant meteorologist.

He told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland: “The Paris accord was about trying to keep us under that 1.5 degree limit over the course of a year.

“So we’ve reached it over the course of a couple of weeks and we’ve done that before.”

Fleming said it had “typically been done in the mild winter months, and this is the first time it’s been done in a summer month, which is a worrying case”.

Fleming warned that it’s “only telling us what we already know”.

“The world is continuing to heat up despite all of the talk,” said Fleming.

“If we look at carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, they’re still going up, so we’re talking about the problem, but we’re basically not doing enough about it.”

‘El Nino’

El Nino, meaning “Little Boy” in Spanish, is marked by warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean near the equator.

The weather pattern last occurred in 2018-19 and takes place every 2-7 years on average.

Most of the warmest years on record have come during El Ninos, and scientists are concerned that this summer and the next could see record temperatures on land and in the sea.

“We’ve got climate change, of course, and that’s raising the temperatures year on year,” explained Fleming.

“But we also have this thing called El Nino and La Nina, which is a cyclical change in our weather which happens over a period of years.

“El Nino years are warm years globally, and La Nina years are cooler years.”

Fleming told RTÉ that the “last three years have been La Nina years” and that this has “kept a bit of a lid on the climate change temperature rise”.

“But this year it’s switched and now we’re into an El Nino year,” said Fleming.

“It was going to be a warm year anyway, but now we’re getting the combined effects of climate change and El Nino and all of the expectation is that globally, this is going to be a very warm year.”

Global oceans were warmer last month than in any other May on record and Fleming said that “when the sea is very warm, that tends to bring warm air and bring global temperatures up and air temperatures up”.

Fleming added that “we’re seeing a combination of long term changes and cyclical changes coming together” and warned that there will be “challenging years” ahead for farmers and food production.

“It’s going to be challenging for farmers to know what to plant and when to plant over the course of the coming years.

“We’re going to see more of these unusual dry spells or even very wet spells, we had a very wet March this year,” said Fleming.

He added: “It’s not that the character of our weather is going to change completely, but the pattern and timing and so on will probably adjust to some extent.

“There will be challenging years because of that. There’ll be benefits as well, I’m sure the last few weeks have been very good for farmers who have been trying to save hay and so on.

“They’ve been able to get very good hay out of their fields, but other crops will have suffered from the lack of rain.

“So it’s a question of trying to deal with that uncertainty, unfortunately.”

-With additional reporting from AFP.