The world just experienced its joint-hottest month since records began, with August pushing the planet’s average global temperature to more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said on Thursday.
Extreme weather and climate-related disasters raged around the world last month. Wildfires surged from Indonesia to Greece and Belgium, while severe drought struck Hungary and Romania. Because that temperature, when measured as a decades-long average, is the level of warming nearly 200 countries vowed to try to prevent under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, in order to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, temperatures of more than 1.5 C above pre-industrial times are significant.
August was the first month since November 2025 in which the world’s average temperature exceeded 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels. With an average global surface air temperature of 16.96 C, last month tied with July 2023 as the world’s warmest month on record. This was 1.65 C hotter than the planet’s average temperature in the 19th century, before humans started burning oil, coal and gas on an industrial scale, C3S said.
Scientists have said climate change likely played a role in the landslides and flash floods that killed hundreds in Nepal and China’s Tibet, although the specifics are still being studied. “We’ve really seen the impact across Europe of how maladapted we are, with roads melting, train lines buckling, schools closing, hospitals completely overwhelmed, and record wildfires for the time of year,” said Samantha Burgess, strategic lead at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.
