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Has the climate in Cape Town changed?
Cape Town has warmed about 1°F between 1976 and 2024.
About 0.2°F per decade, measured from Cape Town's official daily weather records, 1976–2024. Individual years still bounce around — some recent ones came in cool — but the long-term line has clearly risen.
What has actually changed
Each card compares the 1970s (the first ten years of the record) with recent years (the last ten) — the same span the headline and the chart use.
Cape Town's temperature, year by year
Average temperature for each year from 1976 to 2024.
Each bar is one year. Most recent years sit above the older ones. Some recent years still came in cool — warming is a slope, not a straight climb.
In day-to-day terms, that long-term shift shows up as about 5 more days above 90°F compared with the 1970s.
When in the year the change shows up
How much warmer each month is now than in the 1970s. Useful if you garden or care about a particular season — otherwise the headline above already has the answer.
January has warmed the most — about 1.4°F. The warming runs across the whole year, not just one season.
Methodology & sources
Temperature — 1991–2020 normals computed from 25 years of daily observations at Cape Town Intl, a weather station, about 17 km from the city centre. The underlying daily records come from NOAA's global station network.