WASHINGTON — Earth cooked to its hottest month on record in August, blowing far past a key climate threshold, due to the dangerous double whammy of human-caused climate change and a supersized El Nino, according to the European climate service Copernicus.

August’s sizzle also helped push the globe and the United States to swelter through the hottest Northern Hemisphere summer scientists have measured.

Last month the world averaged 62.53 degrees Fahrenheit (16.96 degrees Celsius), which technically was one-hundredth of a degree Celsius more than the all-time global mark set in July 2023, but because that’s also the uncertainty level, it’s considered a tie, said Samantha Burgess, strategic climate lead for Copernicus.

“It is now time to stop acting surprised that our warming planet keeps getting warmer. This is occurring exactly as forecast by scientists literally decades ago,” Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler said in an email. “The interesting question is not whether we will keep breaking heat records (we will), but whether we’re going to do anything about it or just stand there while the climate train runs us over.”

Globally, August was 1.65 degrees Celsius (nearly 3 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, far exceeding the longer term 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) threshold set by the 2015 Paris climate agreement. The eight hottest months on record have all been from July 2023 on, according to Copernicus data.

“Our climate system is really operating well outside the range we would have expected just a decade ago,” Burgess said Wednesday from a United Kingdom that has been beset with heat waves. “We’ve transitioned from climate being very abstract and perhaps impacting the global South or far away places to climate impacting and disrupting our daily lives with schools closing, hospitals being overwhelmed, roads melting, train lines buckling. And the reality is we will get more of these conditions that we’ve seen this summer.”

Global monthly ocean temperatures in August tied a March 2024 all-time record for warmest month recorded, while Aug. 22 set a record for hottest day recorded in the world’s seas, according to Copernicus.

An extra hot summer hits

“This summer has really been exceptional. We’ve seen records that existed for close to 100 years be broken, in the U.S. in particular,” Burgess said.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Wednesday announced that for the first time, summer in the Lower 48 states was hotter than during the peak of the devastating Dust Bowl in 1936. June through August of 2026 in the contiguous United States averaged 74.37 degrees (23.54 degrees Celsius), nearly four tenths of a degree warmer than the mark set 90 years earlier. Globally, this past summer also tied, with 2024, for the hottest on record, according to Copernicus.