Today, BBC News reported that September was the warmest on record globally, according to the weather service Copernicus. Professor David Mond, from the Warwick Mathematics Institute, provides an expert perspective:

"The rise of 0.05 degrees over September last year should be added to last year’s figures, which are themselves quite dramatic. The rate of increase over land and sea, and over northern and southern hemispheres, is different.

"September 2019 had the following increases over the twentieth century averages:

World: 0.95 degrees C

Northern hemisphere 1.24 degrees C

Northern hemisphere land 1.42 degrees C

"Add 0.05 to each of them, and in northern hemisphere land we are nearly at the 1.5 degrees we hoped we would never breach. We’ve now had 43 consecutive Septembers, and 417 consecutive months, with temperatures above the 20th century average.

"The increases may not seem huge, but lead to a huge increase in the frequency of what were previously exceptional events: record-breaking forest fires in California, in the Amazon and in Siberia; rainfall in the French Alps so intense that it washes away roads, houses and even the bodies from cemeteries; so many Atlantic hurricanes that we ran out of names; rates of melting of the ice caps well above the predictions of the IPCC."

7 October 2020

For interviews, contact:

Luke Walton, International Press Manager

L.Walton.1@warwick.ac.uk

+44 (0) 7823 362 150