A slight temperature drop makes Tuesday the world’s second-hottest day

BENGALURU, India (AP) — Global temperatures dropped a minuscule amount after two days of record highs, making Tuesday only the world’s second-hottest day ever.

The European climate service Copernicus calculated that Tuesday’s global average temperature was 0.01 Celsius (0.01 Fahrenheit) lower than Monday’s all-time high of 17.16 degrees Celsius (62.8 degrees Fahrenheit), which was .06 degrees Celsius hotter (0.1 degrees Fahrenheit) than Sunday.

All three days were hotter than Earth’s previous hottest day in 2023.

“The steady drumbeat of hottest-day-ever records and near-records is concerning for three main reasons. The first is that heat is a killer. The second is that the health impacts of heat waves become much more serious when events persist. The third is that the hottest-day records this year are a surprise,” said Stanford University climate scientist Chris Field.

Field said high temperatures usually occur during El Nino years — a natural warming of the equatorial Pacific that triggers weather extremes across the globe — but the last El Nino ended in April.

Field said these high temperatures “underscores the seriousness of the climate crisis.”

“This has been, I mean, probably the shortest-lived record ever,” Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo said Wednesday, after his agency calculated that Monday had beaten Sunday’s mark. And he predicted that mark would also quickly fall. “We are in uncharted territory.”

Before July 3, 2023, the hottest day measured by Copernicus was 16.8 degrees Celsius (62.2 degrees Fahrenheit) on August 13, 2016. In the last 13 months that mark has now been beaten 59 times, according to Copernicus.

Humanity is now “operating in a world that is already much warmer than it was before,” Buontempo