BEIJING: China faced its hottest summer since 1961 while the country’s north experienced its longest rainy season for the same period, the national weather authority said on Tuesday, atmospheric chaos scientists have linked to climate change.
The summer ‘Plum Rains’ – named for their timing coinciding with plums ripening along China’s Yangtze River during the East Asia Monsoon – began one week earlier than usual, Huang Zhou, deputy director of the China Meteorological Administration, told a news conference.
Meanwhile, large swathes of the country experienced extreme heat, with a total of 13.7 high-temperature days, 5.7 days above the average for the same June to August period, Huang added.
The national average temperature was 22.3 degrees Celsius (72.14 degrees Fahrenheit), 1.1 C above normal and tied with 2024 as the highest since 1961, he said.
This summer, the world’s second-largest economy contended with both a stubborn subtropical high-pressure system, which causes warm and dry weather, and the East Asian monsoon. The torrential rains pushing up from Southeast Asia resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people and caused billions of dollars in economic losses.
The extreme weather poses a major challenge to policymakers, as heavy rains threaten to overwhelm ageing flood defences and displace millions, while scorching heat strains the power grid and scalds croplands.
Beijing’s mountainous northern Huairou district and neighbouring Miyuan district received a year’s worth of rain in a single week late last month, triggering flash floods that devastated villages and killed 44 people in the deadliest flood since 2012.
China does not give a tally of heat-related deaths, but a 2023 report published in the medical journal The Lancet estimated heatwave-related mortality in China at 50,900 deaths in 2022, doubling from 2021.
Globally, August 2025 was the third-warmest August, with the average temperature 0.49C above the 1991-2020 average for the month, according to the EU-funded Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) on Tuesday.
The two warmest Augusts on record globally were in 2023 and 2024.
Even the seas are hotter.
Last month, most of the northern Pacific saw above-average sea surface temperatures, hitting record highs in many areas, C3C said in its monthly bulletin.
