50 degrees in Kuwait, 30 in Siberia, the US and Canada in the grip of wildfires. The record temperatures of June 2021 speak volumes about the climate crisis.
The month of June 2021 was the hottest on record in North America and the second hottest in Europe (surpassed only by June 2020). In the global rankings it comes in fourth place, after the Junes of 2016, 2019 and 2020, exceeding the average temperature recorded between 1991 and 2020 by 0.21 degrees Celsius. The data come from Copernicus, the European programme responsible for observing and monitoring conditions on Earth, and provide a framework for understanding the record temperatures that have been recorded in every corner of the planet, from Canada to Kuwait.
On 20 June, surface land temperatures comfortably exceeded 35 degrees Celsius across vast areas of Siberia, reaching 48 degrees near Verkhoyansk and 43 at Govorovo. But the symbol of this exceptional heatwave is Saskylakh, where on 20 June the surface land temperature stood at 37 degrees and the air temperature at 31.9 (the highest ever recorded since 1936 before the summer solstice). The figure is particularly striking when one considers that Saskylakh is a village in Yakutia, north of the Arctic Circle, where winter temperatures range between -35 and -25 degrees Celsius and summer highs normally stay within 20 degrees.
As early as 2020, Copernicus was raising the alarm about the prolonged and extraordinary heatwave in Siberia. In 2021 the story is repeating itself, albeit on (for now) more moderate terms. "We probably don't know why Siberia is one of the regions that warms the most in summer, but we can observe it," comments American climatologist Judah Cohen.
486 people dead suddenly, roughly triple the norm, and a town – Lytton – almost entirely razed to the ground by a wildfire after temperatures broke the 49.6 degrees Celsius mark, the highest temperature ever reached in Canada. This is the tragic toll of the heat dome that struck British Columbia at the end of June and fuelled the spread of more than 180 fires. Across the province, schools, vaccination centres and universities remained closed for several days due to the extreme weather conditions.
Things are no better once you cross the border into the United States. At Seattle's airport, a record temperature of 42.2 degrees Celsius was recorded on 26 June. Further south, in Oregon, Portland hit its all-time high of 46.6 degrees, beating the previous record that dated back to 1965. Around ninety deaths have been confirmed across the two American states.
Sunday 27 June 2021, the 24th minute of the first half of Netherlands vs Czech Republic, a last-16 match at Euro 2020. With both teams in agreement, the referee grants a "cooling break" — a pause to give the 22 players on the pitch time to drink and cool down. The first in Fifa World Cup history dates back to 2014; at the time the Netherlands were also on the pitch, but their opponents were Mexico and the stadium was in Fortaleza, Brazil. Few would have imagined it would also come in handy in Budapest, where the European Championship match was played.
In Hungary, the most torrid day was Thursday 24 June, with a national average of 37 degrees Celsius (a full 10 above the mean) and a peak of 40 degrees at Fülöpháza, in the Southern Great Plain south of the Danube. The national meteorological service, since its founding in 1901, had never recorded such a temperature.
53.5 degrees Celsius. It is hard even to imagine, and it is officially the highest temperature recorded from the beginning of 2021 to date. It was measured on 1 July in the city of Al Jahra, in Kuwait, as the peak of a heatwave that began at the end of June and swept across the entire Arabian Peninsula. Between the end of June and the first days of July, temperatures also exceeded 50 degrees Celsius in Iraq, where the population is grappling with widespread blackouts and some local authorities have granted days off to prevent heat-related illness at work; in Iran, with 51 degrees at Omidiyeh; and also in the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Saudi Arabia.
In the opposite hemisphere it is the depths of winter, but an anomalous one. The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) is unequivocal: with an average that exceeds the figure usually recorded in the same period by a full 2 degrees Celsius, June in New Zealand is officially the warmest since records began, in 1909. The true record temperatures are the 22 degrees reached, on different days, in the localities of Hastings (on the east coast of the North Island) and Leigh (less than a hundred kilometres north of Auckland).
The reasons, the newspaper Guardian reports, lie in warm air masses arriving from subtropical regions, a sea surface warmer than usual, and, ultimately, in the climate changes that have already raised the island nation's average temperature by one degree Celsius over the course of this century.
Not even the Scandinavian countries, accustomed to very different summers, were immune to this heatwave. In Finland, with an average of 16.5 degrees Celsius and the 25-degree threshold exceeded for as many as 25 days out of 30, June 2021 was the warmest month of June ever recorded by the national meteorological service. Records have been kept since 1844 and the previous record dated back to 1953. Near Parikkala, not far from the border with Russia, the mercury reached 33.6 degrees. In Sweden, meanwhile, June 2021 ranks third among the warmest Junes ever recorded.
Article updated on 7 July 2021
