Now that July's sizzling numbers are all in, the European climate monitoring organization made it official: July 2023 was Earth's hottest month on record by a wide margin.
July's global average temperature of 16.95 degrees Celsius (62.51 degrees Fahrenheit) was 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 Tuesday. Normally global temperature records are broken by hundredths or a tenth of a degree, so this margin is unusual.
“These records have dire consequences for both people and the planet exposed to ever more frequent and intense extreme events," said Copernicus deputy director Samantha Burgess. There have been deadly heat waves in the Southwestern United States and Mexico, Europe and Asia. Scientific quick studies put the blame on human-caused climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.
Days in July have been hotter than previously recorded from July 2 on. It's been so extra warm that Copernicus and the World Meteorological Organization made the unusual early announcement that it was likely the hottest month days before it ended. 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 nations of the world agreed to try 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 .7 degrees Celsius (1.3 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than the average July from 1991 to 2020, Copernicus said. The worlds oceans were half a degree Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the previous 30 years and the North Atlantic was 1.05 degrees Celsius (1.9 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than average. Antarctica set record lows for sea ice, 15% below average for this time of year.
Copernicus’ records go back to 1940. That temperature would be hotter than any month the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has recorded and their records go back to 1850. But scientists say it’s actually the hottest in a far longer time period.
“It's a stunning record and makes it quite clearly the warmest month on Earth in ten thousand years,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research in Germany. He wasn't part of the Copernicus team.
Rahmstorf cited studies that use tree rings and other proxies that show present times are the warmest since the beginning of the Holocene Epoch, about 10,000 years ago. And before the Holocene started there was an ice age, so it would be logical to even say this is the warmest record for 120,000 years, he said.
“We should not care about July because it's a record, but because it won't be a record for long,” said Imperial College of London climate scientist Friederike Otto. “It's an indicator of how much we have changed the climate. We are living in a very different world, one that our societies are not adapted to live in very well.”
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4 Comments
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Sh1mon M4sada
...and Germany burning more coal now than ever. But it's OK, according to von der Leyen.
Blacklabel
Hottest in 120,000 years, right?
TaiwanIsNotChina
They say 10,000, but even if it were 120,000, you would demonstrate your superior reasoning by saying that humans can just move to cooler places. Maybe they can move into caves.
theFu
While we didn't have extreme temperatures here, on average, it was the hottest month on record because there were more days consistently just a little hotter. OTOH, at night, it is still dropping into the upper 60s (~ 19.8 °C), which would be comfortable if the dew point wasn't so high. Last night was 18.7 °C here, but still humid.
Whatever we want to call it, the climate it changing and there are huge ramifications world-wide for that. It is easiest to see in the far north and far south latitudes, but the changes are all around us in the middle as well.
Seal level rises of just a few meters will impact well over 50% of humans. Trillions will be spent to hold the oceans back around population centers. Barrier islands will be shifted or disappear. Many island countries will lose a bunch of their current land.
Species that are barely holding on in their current places will disappear. They don't migrate. Other species will drastically change behavior because they need a certain level and length of cold for their annual lives.
While wealthy humans CAN move somewhere else, much of the planet isn't wealthy and people there will be stuck. As the things they eat disappear, they will need to change what they grow and eat BEFORE the climate differences cause local famines. You don't need to believe me. France has been seeing their wine production shift northward for decades. It is too hot in southern France to create the best grapes. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wine-industry-climate-change-60-minutes-2021-12-26/ Almost every food-related industry has a similar story. And the geniuses in the SW USA who can't seem to share the western Colorado River (there is one that flows east through Texas too), need to pull their heads out and figure out a solution. Utah, Nevada, NM, California all need to learn to share for the good of the country, not their local fiefdoms.