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July Has Been So Blistering Hot, Scientists Already Calculate That It’s the Warmest Month on Record

July has been so hot thus far that scientists calculate that this month will be the hottest globally on record and likely the warmest human civilization has seen, even though there are several days left to sweat through.

The World Meteorological Organization and the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service on Thursday proclaimed July’s heat is beyond record-smashing. They said Earth’s temperature has been temporarily passing over a key warming threshold: the internationally accepted goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

According to The Associated Press (AP), temperatures were 1.5 degrees warmer than pre-industrial times for a record 16 days this month, but the Paris climate accord aims to keep the 20- or 30-year global temperature average to 1.5 degrees. A few days of temporarily beating that threshold have happened before, but never in July.

July has been so off-the-charts hot with heat waves blistering three continents – North America, Europe and Asia – that researchers said a record was inevitable. The U.S. Southwest’s all-month heat wave is showing no signs of stopping while also pushing into most of the Midwest and East with more than 128 million Americans under some kind of heat advisory Thursday.

Scientists say that such shattering of heat records is a harbinger for future climate-altering changes as the planet warms. Those changes go beyond just prolonged heat waves and include more flooding, longer-burning wildfires and extreme weather events that put many people at risk.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres pointed to the calculations and urged world leaders, in particular of rich nations, to do more to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases. Despite years of international climate negotiations and lofty pledges from many countries and companies, greenhouse gas emissions continue to go up.

Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo and other scientists said the records are from human-caused climate change augmented by a natural El Nino warming of parts of the central Pacific that changes weather worldwide. But Buontempo said ocean warming in the Atlantic also has been so high — though far away from El Nino — that there’s even more at play. While scientists long predicted the world would continue to warm and have bouts of extreme weather, he said he was surprised by the spike in ocean temperatures and record-shattering loss of sea ice in Antarctica.

“The climate seems to be going crazy at times,” Buontempo said. Copernicus calculated that through the first 23 days of July, Earth’s temperature averaged 16.95 degrees Celsius ( 62.5 degrees Fahrenheit). That’s nearly one-third of a degree Celsius (almost 0.6 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than the previous record for the hottest month, July 2019.

Normally records are broken by hundredths of a degree Celsius, maybe a tenth at most, said Russell Vose, climate analysis group director for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Usually, records aren’t calculated until a week or longer after a month’s end. But Vose, who wasn’t part of the research, his NASA record-keeping counterpart Gavin Schmidt and six other outside scientists said the Copernicus calculations make sense.

Buontempo’s team found that 21 of the first 23 days of July were hotter than any previous days in the database.

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Bahrain News Agency
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