For 13 consecutive months, global average air and ocean temperatures were probably the hottest they have been in human history.

This streak of extraordinary heat ended last month, the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service reported, as July 2024 was only the second hottest ever recorded – 0.04°C cooler than a record set the previous July.

In its wake are thousands of heat-related deaths, ailing ecosystems and a planet firmly on the precipice of a profoundly altered climate.

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“Global warming has consistently toppled records for warm global average temperatures in recent decades, but breaking them by as much as a quarter of a degree for several months is not common,” says Christopher Merchant, a professor of ocean and Earth observation at the University of Reading.

Air temperatures peaked in December 2023, when the Earth was 1.78°C hotter than the pre-industrial average for that time of year. Buoy-based sensors confirmed that the ocean was also record-warm at the time.

So what caused this stretch of unusually high temperatures on land and at sea?

“Several factors came together,” Merchant says. “But the biggest and most important is climate change, largely caused by burning fossil fuels.”

When scientists refer to........

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