August Blazes to Record Heat Thanks to Climate Change and El Niño Power-Up!

August 2026 was the joint-hottest month ever recorded, matching the previous record set in July 2023. This extreme heat was caused by a mix of climate change and the growing influence of El Niño, a natural weather pattern that warms the Pacific Ocean and releases extra heat into the atmosphere. According to the EU’s climate service, August’s global temperatures were 1. 65 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels. This is above the 1. 5 degrees Celsius limit that countries agreed to try not to cross, so we can avoid the worst effects of climate change. While one month above 1. 5 degrees does not mean we have permanently crossed the threshold, it shows a worrying trend toward breaking that limit.

The hot August capped western Europe’s warmest summer ever, with temperatures even higher than the deadly heatwave of 2003. A graph from Copernicus Climate Change Service shows August 2026 reached a global average temperature of 16. 96 degrees Celsius, just above the previous record of 16. 95 degrees in July 2023. Dr Samantha Burgess, a climate expert at Copernicus, called August a remarkable month in the global climate record. She said the impacts of climate change are being felt more and more by communities, economies, and ecosystems around the world. The combination of record air temperatures, record ocean heat, and Europe’s exceptional summer shows how climate change is now causing extremes in both the atmosphere and the oceans.

UN climate chief Simon Stiell said the record clearly shows humanity’s impact on the climate. He described it as the spiralling price of our addiction to fossil fuels, which is fueling the global climate crisis. On top of the ongoing effects of burning fossil fuels, the rise of a powerful El Niño is making things worse. El Niño is a natural climate pattern where a band of the eastern Pacific becomes unusually warm, releasing huge amounts of stored ocean heat into the atmosphere and pushing global temperatures up for about a year. The current El Niño is still getting stronger and could become one of the most powerful ever recorded, according to Copernicus. Its biggest impact on global temperatures is expected to happen over the coming year, so the current run of records may continue.

El Niño is also expected to affect monsoon rains and storms in Asia. In the Philippines, tens of thousands of people were recently displaced by floods. Western Europe’s record-breaking summer was echoed in the UK, which had its hottest summer since records began in 1884. The Met Office found that this was made about 130 times more likely by human-caused climate change. Dr Clair Barnes, an extreme weather researcher at Imperial College London, said these figures have a very real human cost. The heat across the UK and Europe disrupted schools, strained hospitals, hurt food production, fueled fires and droughts, and claimed tens of thousands of lives.

Dr Barnes rejected the idea that such summers are now simply the new normal. She said that until we stop burning fossil fuels, these records will keep breaking and the extremes will get worse faster than we can adapt. How much worse things get is still within our control. In London, people tried to cool off during the heatwave by drinking water. In Spain, heavy rain and flooding damaged homes and cars. The BBC offers a newsletter called Future Earth, which gives updates on climate and environment news from the UK and around the world every week.