Great news, everyone: last month was the hottest June ever recorded on Planet Earth. Everything’s great and we’re fine!!
According to data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, a European climate science group, the global average temperature for June this year was the highest to date since we started measuring these things.
General European averages were more than 2C higher than normal temperatures. Meanwhile, in France, Germany and northern Spain temperatures were between 6 and 10C above average in the last few days of June.
Once again: everything’s fine!!!!!
The temperature spikes aren’t limited to Europe, although the continent has been suffering through the kind of heatwave that climate scientists say will only become more common. Globally, the average temperature in June was 0.1C higher than the previous record-holding hottest year, back in 2016.
That European heatwave caused wildfires across Spain, and France’s hottest recorded temperature ever – a shocking 45.9C, along with record highs in Germany, Poland and Czech Republic as well.
Head of the Copernicus Climate Change Service Jean-Noel Thepaut said of their findings:
Although local temperatures may have been lower or higher than those forecast, our data shows that the temperatures over the southwestern region of Europe during the last week of June were unusually high.
Although this was exceptional, we are likely to see more of these events in the future due to climate change.
Professor Hannah Cloke, natural hazards researcher at the University of Reading in the UK, said:
We knew June was hot in Europe, but this study shows that temperature records haven’t just been broken. They have been obliterated. This is the hottest June on record in Europe by a country mile, and the warmest June we have ever seen globally.
Repeat after me: everything is totally, one hundred per cent fine. We are not doomed to perish in a fireball of our own making. Everything is……….fine.
