Last month smashed through the previous October temperature record from 2019 by a massive margin, the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said.

“The record was broken by 0.4 degrees Celsius, which is a huge margin,” said C3S Deputy Director Samantha Burgess.

Globally, the average surface air temperature in October was 1.7 degrees Celsius warmer than the same month in 1850-1900, which Copernicus defines as the pre-industrial period.

The record-breaking October means 2023 is now “virtually certain” to be the warmest year recorded, C3S said in a statement. The previous record was in 2016 - another El Niño year.

Copernicus’ dataset goes back to 1940. “When we combine our data with the IPCC (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), then we can say that this is the warmest year for the last 125,000 years,” Burgess said.

The longer-term data from the UN climate science panel IPCC includes readings from sources such as ice cores, tree rings, and coral deposits.

The only other time before October that a month breached the temperature record by such a large margin was in September 2023.

Climate change is fueling increasingly destructive extremes. This year, that included floods, severe heatwaves in South America, and Canada’s worst wildfire season on record.

“We must not let the devastating floods, wildfires, storms, and heatwaves seen this year become the new normal,” said Piers Forster, climate scientist at the University of Leeds.

Although scientists say this has been the hottest year in 125,000 years, Northeast China was hit by unusually cold temperatures and blizzards on Monday, which resulted in the rescheduling of hundreds of flights, the closing of schools, and the issuance of increased weather alerts and warnings to stay indoors in several cities.