In 2024, global temperatures for June through August were the hottest on record, narrowly topping the same period in 2023.
In 2024, global temperatures for June through August were the hottest on record, narrowly topping the same period in 2023. The exceptional heat extended throughout other seasons, too, with global temperatures breaking records for 15 straight months from June 2023 until August 2024, according to scientists from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).
Although this spell of record heat fits within a long-term warming trend driven by human activity—primarily greenhouse gas emissions—the intensity of the heat, which reached a crescendo in the last half of 2023, surprised leading climate scientists. In a commentary in Nature, Gavin Schmidt, the director of GISS, used words like “humbling” and “confounding” to explain just how far temperatures overshot expectations during that period.
The charts on this page show how much global temperatures in 2023 and 2024 diverged from expectations based on NASA’s temperature record. Roughly a year later, Schmidt and other climatologists are still trying to understand why.
“Warming in 2023 was head-and-shoulders above any other year, and 2024 will be as well,” Schmidt said. “I wish I knew why, but I don’t. We’re still in the process of assessing what happened and if we are seeing a shift in how the climate system operates.”
Read more at NASA Earth Observatory
Image: NASA Earth Observatory map and charts by Michala Garrison, based on data from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
