分类： environment

A new independent analysis conducted by Agence France-Presse (AFP) using data from Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service has delivered a stark warning about accelerating global warming: regions inhabited by nearly 900 million people around the world experienced their hottest July on record in 2026. The analysis, which drew on billions of data points from Copernicus’s widely respected ERA5 climate model, identified 33 nations that broke all previous historical temperature records for the seventh month of the year.

Unlike many low- and middle-income nations that lack the infrastructure to publish regular, detailed climate data, major European countries including France and Spain were able to independently verify the record-breaking conditions through their national meteorological agencies: Meteo-France and Spain’s AEMET. To fill gaps in global reporting, AFP carried out its own independent assessment of the Copernicus dataset, which combines satellite observations from multiple countries, readings from land, sea and airborne weather stations, and advanced climate modelling to deliver consistent hourly global climate data dating back to 1950.

The most heavily impacted region by population was Africa, where close to 400 million people lived through the unprecedented heat. The Sahel, a semi-arid belt stretching across the continent from west to east, was hit particularly hard, with 10 nations breaking July heat records. While temperature anomalies near the equator are typically smaller than those in temperate zones, multiple Sahel nations including Chad and Sudan saw average July temperatures climb more than 2 degrees Celsius above the 1981-2010 baseline. Long warned as one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change, many Sahel countries are already battling overlapping crises: armed conflict, widespread food insecurity, and entrenched poverty that leaves communities with little capacity to adapt to extreme heat. This trend aligns with warnings from the World Weather Attribution network, which noted in January that extreme heat events have become nearly 10 times more frequent since 2015, a shift directly tied to human-caused climate change.

In the Americas, the ongoing naturally occurring El Niño pattern, which emerged in June 2026 and is projected to peak later in the year, amplified already soaring temperatures across Central America and northern South America. Around 110 million people from Mexico down to northern Brazil, stretching from the Pacific coast to the Guiana Highlands, recorded their hottest July on record. Three nations in Central America’s climate-vulnerable “Dry Corridor” — El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras — broke monthly heat records in both June and July, worsening already dire fears of widespread famine. The United Nations World Food Programme recently identified Central America, including the Caribbean, as the region expected to face the steepest relative increase in food insecurity, projecting that an additional 16 million people could slip into food insecurity by the end of 2027.

In Europe, nearly 120 million people across southern Britain, western France, and northern and eastern Spain lived through the region’s hottest July ever recorded. In France, average temperatures hit a staggering 3.8 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 baseline — a reference period that is already significantly warmer than the pre-industrial climate of 1850-1900. Along with record heat, both France and Spain saw exceptional drought conditions that created tinder-dry fuel for catastrophic wildfires. In late July, a megafire in France’s Gironde department burned nearly 42,000 hectares of land and forced the evacuation of more than 220,000 residents. Around the same time, Spain faced its largest wildfire in modern history, which scorched almost 44,000 hectares in Avila province near the Spanish capital Madrid.

Beyond these major concentrated regions, scattered areas across the globe home to more than 250 million additional people also saw unprecedented July heat. These included China’s Sichuan province, the U.S. states of Wyoming and Colorado, and the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Borneo, underscoring the widespread reach of the 2026 record heat event.

Just two weeks after another powerful storm battered southern China, Typhoon Dolphin has swept through the country’s eastern coastal regions, leaving a trail of transportation chaos and persistent flood threats even as its wind speeds drop after making landfall.

The storm came ashore twice along Zhejiang Province’s coastline on Sunday, August 9 2026, and had steadily lost intensity by the following day, according to China’s National Meteorological Centre (NMC). By Monday morning, the agency had downgraded the typhoon alert to its lowest severity level, but issued a urgent advisory that heavy downpours would continue to drench large swathes of eastern and central China for another 24 hours.

The elevated risks from lingering rainfall prompted state broadcaster CCTV to report that authorities had activated the highest possible flash flood warning for multiple areas in eastern and southern Zhejiang. Northern parts of the country are also bracing for extreme weather this week: five Beijing districts activated red heavy rain alerts on Monday, with official warnings highlighting elevated risks of landslides and urban flooding.

In Shanghai, China’s leading financial hub, the storm’s impact on travel has been severe. The city’s two major commercial airports reported that a total of 943 scheduled flights were scrapped on Monday, while most local public transit services including regional train lines were temporarily suspended. Adjacent Zhejiang has seen a uneven recovery: Hangzhou, the provincial capital, restored suspended subway services by Monday morning, while Ningbo International Airport only cleared for a resumption of flight operations starting at midday local time. Airport officials cautioned that many services would remain disrupted, as residual storm damage and unstable weather conditions have not fully abated.

Over the weekend, when Typhoon Dolphin was at its peak strength, it triggered a top-tier national emergency alert, forced more than 1,000 flight cancellations across the region and pushed authorities to evacuate tens of thousands of residents from high-risk coastal and low-lying areas.

This storm marks the latest in a string of extreme weather events to hit China in 2026. It comes just 14 days after Typhoon Noul made landfall in southern Guangdong Province, which officials labeled the strongest storm to hit the country so far this year. Last month, Typhoon Maysak caused catastrophic damage across southern and central China: devastating floods triggered by the storm killed 39 people in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, while thunderstorms and gale-force winds in central Hubei Province left 11 more dead and 331 injured.

Climate scientists have repeatedly warned that the rising frequency and intensity of such extreme weather events is a direct consequence of global warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion. As the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, China has also positioned itself as a global leader in renewable energy development, with a formal national policy target to achieve carbon neutrality across its entire economy by 2060.

Europe, the continent warming faster than any other on Earth, is facing an unprecedented summer of climate-driven disasters, after the European Union’s official climate monitoring service confirmed Monday that Western Europe has just endured the hottest combined June and July ever recorded.

Successive back-to-back heatwaves have baked the region, leaving parched landscapes and severe water shortages that have created near-perfect conditions for out-of-control wildfires to spread. Data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the EU’s leading climate monitoring body, shows that the average temperature across Western Europe for the first two months of summer 2025 hit 21.62 degrees Celsius, breaking the previous record set just three years ago in 2022.

This new record is a direct reflection of the extraordinary, unrelenting heat that has gripped the region since the start of summer, Copernicus officials noted. Beyond air temperatures, soil moisture levels across Western Europe are already significantly lower than they were during the crippling 2022 drought, one of the most severe water shortages the region has seen in modern history.

Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts which manages the Copernicus program, emphasized that these conditions offer a clear, stark example of how human-caused climate change is supercharging extreme heat events. “Heat and drought increasingly reinforce one another, creating a feedback loop that makes these events more severe and longer-lasting,” Burgess explained.

Exceptionally dry conditions have been recorded across much of Western and Central Europe in July, stretching from southern Europe’s Spain and France through Central Europe’s Austria and Hungary, and reaching as far north as the United Kingdom, Ireland and parts of Iceland. Major European waterways including the Seine, Rhine and Danube have seen water levels drop to far below normal seasonal averages, disrupting commercial shipping, cutting off water supplies for agricultural irrigation and reducing hydropower output across multiple countries.

The combination of extreme heat and dry vegetation has also created prime wildfire conditions. Climate scientists have long warned that the frequency of extreme fire-prone weather across Europe is rising steadily as global temperatures climb. This summer, France and Spain have already fought the most destructive wildfires the two nations have seen in living memory, with dangerous blazes also spreading across other European nations, as well as western North America, where the U.S. Northwest and Canada have faced severe fire seasons of their own.

Beyond land-based extremes, Copernicus also announced that global ocean surface temperatures hit a new record high in July, marking the second consecutive month that this benchmark has been broken. The record warmth is being driven by widespread marine heatwaves around European coastlines and a rapidly strengthening El Niño event developing across the tropical Pacific Ocean.

The global average sea surface temperature for July hit 20.96 degrees Celsius, surpassing the previous record set in 2023. Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus, told reporters on August 5 that while parts of the Mediterranean and North Atlantic are running far above average temperatures, the developing El Niño is the primary driver of the new global ocean heat record. “We are now facing a very large El Niño — possibly unprecedented in terms of its amplitude,” Buontempo said. “It is clear that the contribution coming from the tropical Pacific becomes quite important.”

El Niño is the warm phase of a natural Pacific climate cycle that temporarily raises tropical ocean temperatures and alters global weather patterns, increasing the risk of extreme drought and flooding across many regions. It also adds extra heat to a planet already warmed by centuries of fossil fuel burning that has pumped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

El Niño events typically reach their peak strength at the end of the calendar year, before stored ocean heat is released into the atmosphere, pushing up global average temperatures. The previous major El Niño event helped make 2023 the second-hottest year on record globally, and 2024 the hottest. Buontempo said climate researchers now expect a new global average temperature record to be set either later this year or by early 2027.

On a global scale, July 2025 tied for the second-warmest July ever recorded, with an average surface air temperature 1.47 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline from 1850 to 1900, the benchmark used to measure progress toward global climate targets. The last 11 consecutive years are already the 11 hottest years ever recorded, and Buontempo noted that current temperatures are outside the range that modern human civilization has ever experienced. “We have not seen a climate that warm during our lifetime, and very possibly our civilisation,” he said, adding that the primary driver of this ongoing warming remains the rising concentration of greenhouse gases from human activity.

Oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the excess heat generated by humanity’s carbon emissions, making them the planet’s primary natural climate regulator. But rising ocean temperatures come with severe cascading risks: hotter oceans fuel more intense tropical storms, increase extreme rainfall events, and cause widespread coral bleaching that destroys critical marine ecosystems.

Copernicus generates its climate data using billions of measurements from satellites, land-based weather stations and ocean monitoring sensors, with a consistent temperature record extending back to 1940, making it one of the most trusted regional and global climate monitoring sources in the world.