PARIS: The world saw its hottest June on record last month, the EU’s climate monitoring service said Thursday, as climate change and the El Nino weather pattern looked likely to drive another scorching northern summer.

The EU monitor Copernicus also said preliminary data showed Tuesday was the hottest day ever recorded — beating the record set only the day before. It’s the latest in a series of records halfway through a year that has already seen a drought in Spain and fierce heat waves in China as well the United States.

“The month was the warmest June globally at just over 0.5 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 average, exceeding June 2019 — the previous record — by a substantial margin,” the EU monitor said in a statement from its C3S climate unit.

Temperatures reached June records across northwest Europe while parts of Canada, the United States, Mexico, Asia and eastern Australia “were significantly warmer than normal”, Copernicus noted.

On the other hand it was cooler than normal in western Australia, the western United States and western Russia, it said. The tumbling records reflect the impact of global warming driven by greenhouse gases released from human activity.

Copernicus told AFP preliminary data showed a global average temperature of 17.03 C on Tuesday, beating another record of 16.88 C already set on Monday.