The month of August, just ended, was the hottest ever recorded on the surface of land and oceans since temperatures have been regularly measured. This is explained by the European Union's climate monitoring service, Copernicus, which highlights how the recorded data has matched the previous record, dating back to July 2023.

Record heat: air temperature 1.65 degrees above the pre-industrial period

This is yet another alarm bell regarding global warming, made worse by the fact that, also in August, the surface temperature of extra-polar oceans similarly reached an all-time high. Partly due to climate change, and partly due to the emergence of the phenomenon known as El Niño in the equatorial Pacific: "The effects of this phenomenon are already being felt on land, with conditions that favour the intensification of seasonal wildfires across Indonesia," Copernicus notes.

"With a global average surface air temperature 1.65 degrees Celsius above the estimated pre-industrial reference value – the European service continues – August 2026 was the first month to exceed 1.5 degrees since November 2025." That is, the most ambitious threshold set by the Paris Agreement, according to which the growth of the global average temperature must be limited to a maximum of 2 degrees, while remaining as close as possible to 1.5 degrees.

Europe's hottest summer ever: the 2003 record surpassed

As for the oceans, the recorded figure matched that of March 2024. But an absolute daily record was also reached on Saturday 22 August, when temperatures hit 21.1 degrees Celsius: a figure higher than that recorded in March 2024, when the previous all-time high of 21.09 degrees Celsius had been reached.

As if that were not enough, Copernicus adds that "August marked the end of the hottest summer ever recorded in Western Europe, surpassing the previous record set in 2003." The region experienced repeated heatwaves, "which extended an exceptional period that began in May. Widespread drought was also observed across much of the region and large parts of central and eastern Europe, in some cases persisting since May, with severely arid conditions reported in France, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Romania and Serbia." With direct consequences both on the volume of water in crucial rivers such as the Rhine, the Danube and the Dnipro, and in terms of mega-fires fuelled by the lack of rainfall.

"Impacts on communities, economies and ecosystems around the world"

It is clear that a situation of this kind entails impacts that "are being felt more and more in communities, economies and ecosystems around the world," stressed Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director for Climate at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).

Now, with the arrival of autumn, the risk is that other types of extreme events will occur, starting with storms, torrential rains and floods. These too are direct effects of climate change caused by human activities.