If melting power cables in Portland, Oregon weren’t enough of an indication, new satellite data confirms what many sweat-drenched Americans and Canadians could have guessed: June 2021 was the single hottest June on record in North America.
This latest data is courtesy of the European Union’s Copernicus program. According to the program’s new June 2021 report, last month was also the fourth-hottest June recorded worldwide and the second-warmest June recorded in Europe.
To be more specific, the report showed that June temperatures in North America were 1.2C higher than the average from 1991 to 2020, which is more than 2C above pre-industrial levels.
Even more telling is the fact that this is the 12th year of above-average June temperatures in the region, and the greatest increase recorded until now. Human-induced climate change has been steadily bumping up average summer temperatures year after year
June 2021was considerably warmer than average over much of Europe. Temperatures were particularly high over Finland and western Russia: the June average was the highest ever at a site in Helsinki with measurements dating back to 1844, and Moscow experienced its warmest June day on record.
This would not normally be expected in the same year as a La Niña phenomenon, which is generally associated with a cooling effect, Peter Stott, a climatologist at the U.K. Met Office, told the BBC.
Stott said that while climate scientists have been predicting that global warming will result in ever-rising temperatures around the world, the extraordinarily high temperatures in several cities in the U.S. and Canada during the June heatwave didn’t just surpass the old records; they utterly smashed them.
The data is “telling us that changes in average climate are leading to rapid escalation not just of extreme temperatures, but of extraordinarily extreme temperatures,” Stott said.
