August 2026 ties for hottest month ever recorded

August 2026 has tied for the hottest month ever recorded, sharing the title with July 2023, according to data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. The global surface air temperature during August reached 16.96 degrees Celsius, or 62.53 degrees Fahrenheit, making it the warmest August on record and 1.65 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average.

This temperature surpasses the 1.5-degree Celsius increase that the Paris Agreement identified as the threshold for irreversible damage caused by global warming. The United Nations announced last week that consistently exceeding this threshold is now "unavoidable." Global ocean temperatures in August also matched March 2024 as the highest on record across all months.

Western Europe and the United States experienced their hottest summers overall, as reported by Copernicus and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data. The record may not come as a surprise, considering the extreme weather events that occurred throughout the summer, including wildfires and floods, and the impending historic El Niño.

Marc Alessi, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, explained that this El Niño is occurring on top of a changed climate due to the burning of fossil fuels. Scientists believe that regardless of whether 2026 breaks the record for the hottest year ever, 2027 is almost certainly going to surpass it because of the El Niño conditions.

"We now live in a completely different climate than the one that existed 50 years ago," Alessi stated. To ensure the continued delivery of impactful, accurate, and independent science journalism, consider subscribing to Scientific American. By supporting their work through a subscription, you are helping to fund staff and freelance journalists who are dedicated to telling true, important, and compelling science stories.

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