A scorching summer that broke records in Italy, Europe, and across the world . It's a situation that has become an emergency, but at the same time, it risks being just a taste of what lies ahead. This is according to Copernicus data , which show that in August, the global average surface air temperature was 16.96 degrees Celsius, 0.85 degrees above the 1991-2020 average. It was therefore the warmest August on record and the warmest month on record in the series, tied with July 2023.
Digging deeper into the data, we also discover that temperatures have been 1.65 degrees Celsius higher than in the pre-industrial period (1850-1900) , when the greenhouse effect caused by the massive combustion of fossil fuels was not yet recorded. And since November 2025, a single month hasn't exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius, the level considered by scientists to be the limit, that is, the long-term threshold beyond which the consequences of global warming are even more unpredictable.
The June-August quarter of 2026 was also the warmest on record globally. In Europe, however, the summer was the third warmest in the series, after 2024 and 2022. The record belongs to Western Europe, which experienced the warmest summer ever observed, surpassing the 2003 record.
"This August was a significant month in global climate history," explains Samantha Burgess, climate director at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. "The effects are increasingly being felt in communities, economies, and ecosystems around the world," she adds.
(Unioneonline)
