European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service

Last year was the planet's hottest on record by a substantial margin and likely the world's warmest in the last 100,000 years, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said on Tuesday.

In a stunning anomaly, October 2023 has been declared the hottest October on record, according to the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). The month surpassed the previous temperature record set in October 2019 by a remarkable margin, with an average surface air temperature of 15.3°C—0.85°C above the 1991-2020 October average and 0.4°C higher than October 2019.

Summer has just begun in the Northern Hemisphere but a brutal heat wave is already gripping parts of Europe, China and the United States, where record temperatures expected this weekend are a stark illustration of the dangers of a warming climate.

The last four years have been the world's hottest since record-keeping began, with 2018 the fourth warmest on record, according to data published Thursday by US research group Berkeley Earth, reports AFP.