The latest Copernicus report records record temperatures in the atmosphere and seas, including devastating fires, drought and 35,000 excess deaths in Europe. What role will the new super El Niño play in the coming months?
From the month of August 2026 we will remember the lockdowns due to heat waves, the nights without refreshment, the fires that create storms, the boiling seas: in short, we will hardly be nostalgic for the main month of summer holidays, which has reached an average temperature of +1.65 °C since the pre-industrial era.
The survey comes from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which says August brought temperatures the planet hadn’t seen for 100,000 years.
August 2026 was the hottest month ever on a par with July 2023, with an average global temperature reaching 16.96 degrees °C: even then there was the influence of El Niño to aggravate “baseline” temperatures exacerbated by anthropogenic global warming.
2026 was also the hottest August ever, in the hottest summer ever for Western Europe (the previous record was 2003), as well as the first month to exceed +1.5 °C since November 2025. The months between June and August 2026 constituted the hottest period globally, on a par with 2024.
Heat in the oceans
But what also makes the month just ended extraordinary – not in a good way – is the fact that “different components of the climate system have reached unprecedented levels at the same time” as explained by Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
In addition to the atmospheric temperature records, we have in fact achieved the highest average monthly sea temperature ever recorded in the extrapolar ocean, i.e. the totality of ocean waters outside the polar regions, which reached 21.11°C, exceeding the previous August record of 20.98°C in 2023.
Meanwhile, the onset of what is set to become a super El Niño event has caused surface waters to accumulate at exceptionally high temperatures in the tropical Pacific, a phenomenon that will continue to spread excess heat across the planet in the coming months. Intense heat waves also affected the seas of the Atlantic coast and the western Mediterranean.
Beyond the red line
A few days after the report in which the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) declared that the world will now inevitably exceed the threshold of +1.5 °C of global warming, with the most optimistic scenario involving a maximum temperature increase of 1.8 °C compared to pre-industrial levels, the month of August 2026 marks the first return of this overshoot since last November.
The severe drought that began in May in large areas of Europe has continued and will present a very high toll; the flows of the main European rivers which were exceptionally low and the forest fires which touched areas dangerously close to population centers in France and Spain. Drought and heat waves have also led to lower agricultural yields than usual; due to the unbearable temperatures, it is estimated that last summer there were around 35,000 deaths in excess of those predicted by the statistics.
Now the challenge is to match this string of negative records with equally exemplary climate action, and not resign ourselves to the fact that this exceptional August will become the norm.
