was the world’s hottest September on record, with unusually high temperatures recorded off Siberia, in the Middle East, and in parts of South America and Australia, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said.
Reuters reports that a long-term warming trend caused by emissions of heat-trapping gases and high temperatures this year, have played a major role in disasters from fires in California and the Arctic to floods in Asia.
Globally, September was 0.05 degrees Celsius warmer than the same month in 2019 and 0.08C warmer than in 2016, previously the warmest and second warmest September on record, the Copernicus data showed.
Over the past three months of 2020, climate events such as the La Niña phenomenon and projected low levels of autumn Arctic sea ice will influence whether the year as a whole will become the warmest on record, the Copernicus service said.
Added to this is the rapid melting of permafrost - a mish-mash of ice, soil, rocks and organic matter, including animals that went extinct more than 11 000 years ago - found at high altitudes such as the Himalayas, the Andes, the Southern Als of New Zealand, as well as Antartica and the Arctic.
Human activity that produces green-house gases and the the burning of fossil fuels add to the problem of heat-waves that speed up the melting of the permafrost.
Scientists estimate that permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere alone holds about 1.5 trillion tonnes of carbon. That’s twice what is in the atmosphere now, and three times more than what humans have emitted since the Industrial Revolution began.