Last month was hottest October on record around the world says climate monitor

EUROPE'S climate monitor has announced that last month was the hottest October ever recorded globally.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) has reported that every month since June 2023 has been the warmest on record for the respective month of the year.

The average surface air temperature for the month was 15.3°C, 0.85°C above the 1991-2020 average for October and 0.40°C above the temperature of the previous warmest October in 2019.

Conditions in Europe were also wetter than average last month, with widespread heavy rainfall triggering flooding and damage were associated with the passage of low-pressure systems. 

Storms Aline and Babet brought record-breaking levels of rainfall to much of Western Europe, while elsewhere around the globe suffered from drier than average conditions, with severe droughts hitting areas such as Mexico and central/east Asia. 

"We can say with virtual certainty that 2023 will be the warmest year on record," said C3S deputy director Samantha Burgess.

She noted that temperatures have temporarily exceeded 1.5°C above preindustrial temperatures for the past three months of 2023. "This doesn’t mean we have broken the Paris Agreement, but the reality is that the more days, weeks, or months we have above 1.5°C, the sooner we will exceed the Paris Agreement limit," she said.

"This makes me nervous about what is to come. When we combine all the data together, the global air temperature records, the global sea surface temperature records, the global sea ice records, all of these indications together really show us that our climate is changing at a very rapid pace and we have to adapt to the climate that we are facing right now," Ms Burgess continued.