Now that the hot numbers for July are in, the European climate The monitoring organization made it official: July 2023 was by far the hottest month on earth since records began.
The global average temperature in July was 16.95 degrees Celsius (62.51 degrees Fahrenheit), a third of a degree Celsius (six tenths of a degree Fahrenheit) higher than the previous record set in 2019. Copernicus Climate Change Service, a division of the European Union’s space program, announced on Tuesday. Typically, global temperature records are beaten by hundredths or tenths of a degree, so this gap is unusual.
“These records are having devastating consequences for both people and the planet, which is facing increasingly frequent and intense extreme events,” said Samantha Burgess, Copernicus Deputy Director. There have been deadly heat waves in the Southwest United States and Mexico, Europe And Asia. Rapid scientific studies prove this This is due to man-made climate change from burning coal, oil and natural gas.
Beginning July 2, days in July were hotter than previously recorded. It was so particularly warm that Copernicus and the World Meteorological Organization made it through the unusually early announcement that it was probably the hottest month before its end. Tuesday’s calculations made it official.
The month was 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times. In 2015, the world’s nations agreed to prevent long-term warming – not individual months or even years, but decades – that is 1.5 degrees warmer than pre-industrial times.
Last month was so hot it was 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.3 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than the average July from 1991 to 2020, Copernicus said. The world’s oceans were half a degree Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than in the past 30 years and the North Atlantic was 1.05 degrees Celsius (1.9 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than average. Antarctica saw record lows for sea ice, 15% below the average for this time of year.
Copernicus records date back to 1940. That temperature would be hotter than any month recorded by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and their records date back to 1850. However, scientists say it is actually the hottest for a much longer period of time.
“This is a stunning record and clearly makes it the warmest month on Earth in ten thousand years,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research in Germany. He was not part of the Copernicus team.
quoted by Rahmstorf studies using tree rings and other proxies showing that the current times are the warmest since the beginning of the Holocene some 10,000 years ago. And before the Holocene began, there was an ice age, so it would be logical to even say this is the warmest record in 120,000 years, he said.
“We shouldn’t worry about July because it’s a record, but because it won’t be a record for much longer,” said climate researcher Friederike Otto of Imperial College of London. “It is an indicator of how much we have changed the climate. We live in a very different world in which our societies cannot live very well.”
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