While the strengthening El Niño helped boost temperatures, climate change is the main culprit for making August so hot.
Data from Copernicus, the European Union's climate agency, shows that last month tied with July 2023 for Earth's hottest month. (July is also usually the hottest month of the year.) This July also tied with July 2024 for the second-hottest July on record, while June 2026 was the second-hottest June ever recorded. The news comes on the heels of a separate announcement on Wednesday from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which declared this was the hottest summer for the US, beating a previous record set during the Dust Bowl.
The sweltering summer is a grim sign of how burning fossil fuels is pushing temperatures up around the globe while unleashing more intense and longer heat waves.
"August 2026 was a remarkable month in the global climate record," Samantha Burgess, the strategic lead for climate at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, said in a statement. "Combined with record global sea surface temperatures and the warmest summer on record for Western Europe, these observations show how climate change is driving extremes across both the atmosphere and the oceans. The impacts of these conditions are increasingly being felt by communities, economies, and ecosystems across the world."
The global average temperature for August was 1.65 degrees Celsius (3 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial average, according to Copernicus. While it was hot globally this summer, the impacts played out with dangerous and sometimes deadly results locally.
Climate change has boosted background temperatures, but the El Niño roiling the eastern Pacific Ocean has piled on more heat. El Niños usually coincide with a temporary uptick in global temperature from 0.1 to 0.2 degrees Celsius. This year's El Niño is forecast to reach record strength and upend weather around the globe. But the full impact on the planet's temperature won't be felt until next year, meaning that next summer may be even hotter than the one we just lived through.
Climate scientists have warned that the world needs to prevent long-term average warming from breaching 1.5 degrees Celsius to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. While temperatures above the threshold for a single month don't represent a permanent breach of this temperature, they're a sign that the world is getting closer to this benchmark.
Earlier this month, the UN warned in a report that the world is likely to cross the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold in a few years. To slow and eventually reverse the rise in global temperatures, the world needs to stop burning fossil fuels and lower carbon emissions.
"This summer's scorching heat, raging wildfires, and deadly floods are a warning of what lies ahead," UN Secretary-General Antőnio Guterres said in a statement. "We must make the overshoot above 1.5 degrees as small and short as possible. That demands an overshoot of ambition."
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