Amid blistering heatwaves, July is “virtually certain” to be the world’s warmest month on record, say scientists.
So hot has the month been to date that researchers are confident the 2019 record will be broken, even with several days to go.
UN chief Antonio Guterres said the planet is entering an “era of global boiling”.
Scientists agree the extra heat is mainly linked to fossil fuel use.
US President Joe Biden described climate change as an “existential threat” and that no one “can deny the impact of climate change anymore”.
Some experts believe that July might well be the warmest month in the past 120,000 years.
Researchers are not surprised that July is set to break the current record for the warmest month as there have been plenty of indications in recent weeks that the world is seeing far greater levels of heating.
The world’s warmest day occurred on July 6, and the hottest 23 days ever recorded were all this month, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Their provisional average temperature for the first 25 days of the month is 16.95C, which is well above the 16.63C figure for the whole of July 2019.
Other analysis has come to the same conclusion.
Dr Karsten Haustein from the University of Leipzig has calculated that July 2023 will be 1.3C-1.7C above the average July temperatures recorded before the widespread use of fossil fuels. The best guess is around 1.5C. He’s confident that even if the last few days are cooler, the margin of error is enough to make July the hottest yet seen.
“Not only will it be the warmest July, but the warmest month ever in terms of absolute global mean temperature,” he said in a statement.
“We may have to go back thousands if not tens of thousands of years to find similarly warm conditions on our planet.”
(BBC News)
