The EU's climate monitor said on Thursday that August was the hottest single month ever recorded globally, with ocean temperatures also reaching unprecedented highs as western Europe capped its warmest summer.

In response to the assessment by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the UN warned that until humanity weaned off fossil fuels, the planet would only push deeper into uncharted territory.

Copernicus observations go back to 1940 but other evidence – such as ice cores, tree rings and coral skeletons – allow scientists to place today's climate against a much longer historical context.

"Humans haven't seen temperatures as hot as today for, arguably, at least the last 100,000 years," Samantha Burgess from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which oversees Copernicus, said.

Global average air temperatures in August were 16.96 degrees Celsius, Copernicus said – surpassing by 0.01C the previous all-time monthly record set in July 2023. Copernicus said it considered the two months joint-highest given the narrow difference.

Scientists say that human activity – primarily the burning of coal, oil and gas – has warmed the planet by roughly 1.4C since pre-industrial times and increased the severity and likelihood of extreme weather.

Yet heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions rose to new highs in 2025.

"The evidence is irrefutable: this is the spiralling price of humanity's fossil fuel addiction, and the global climate crisis it is fuelling," United Nations climate chief Simon Stiell said of the Copernicus report.

Global sea surface temperatures also set a new daily high and tied equal-hottest for August, extending a three-month streak of record-breaking warmth across the world's oceans.

More than 90 percent of excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions has been absorbed by the oceans, sparing land from warming but at severe cost to marine life, reefs and coastal communities.

Records tumbled in overheated basins like the Atlantic and Mediterranean and also the tropical Pacific, where the strongest El Nino weather pattern in the modern era is fast accumulating strength.

These events are marked by unusually warm Pacific waters but raise the odds of wild weather thousands of miles away, from floods in Peru to droughts in Africa and wildfires in Australia. (AFP)



Edited by Robert Kemp