TOKYO — Summer in Japan this year matched that in 2023 as the country's warmest since records began in 1898, data from Tokyo's weather office showed on Monday.
Climate scientists have already predicted that 2024 will be the hottest year on record for the Earth because of a warming planet.
Japan's long-term average temperature between June and August was 1.76 degrees Celsius above the standard value, equaling the same figure in the same period last year, the Japan Meteorological Agency (JCA) said.
This July was already the hottest in Japan since records began, with the variation across the nation being 2.16 C higher than average.
In central Tokyo alone, 123 people died of heat stroke that month, when extreme heat waves saw a record number of ambulances mobilized in the capital, local authorities said.
Southern Japan was also hit by Typhoon Shanshan last week, one of the strongest to hit the country of 125 million people in decades.
Shanshan killed at least six people, including three family members, in a landslide and dumped record rain across many areas.
Typhoons in the region have been forming closer to coastlines, intensifying more rapidly and lasting longer over land due to climate change, according to a study released in July.
A rapid attribution analysis by the Imperial College London in the United Kingdom using peer-reviewed methodology calculated that Shanshan's winds were made 26 percent more likely by climate change.
Japanese weather agency official Kaoru Takashi cited the peculiar movement of westerly winds above Japan this year that "made it easier for the archipelago to be shrouded in warm air from the south."
"Also at play is the long-term effect of global warming, which is pushing up average temperature," Takahashi told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Scientists say fossil fuel emissions are worsening the length, frequency and intensity of heat waves across the world.
From January to July, global temperatures were 0.7 C above the 1991–2020 average, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service reported recently.
Record temperatures have been observed in the Mediterranean Sea, Norway's Arctic Svalbard archipelago and the Ukrainian capital Kyiv in the past few weeks alone.
Australia registered a record-high winter temperature last month, with the mercury hitting 41.6 C (106.7 F) in part of its rugged and remote northwestern coast.
In Europe, Greece has seen 50 percent more summer wildfires this year than in 2023, as well as its earliest heat wave and warmest winter on record.
The rising temperatures are leading to longer wildfire seasons and increasing the area burnt in the flames, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said.
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