EU climate monitor: July shaping up to be Earth’s hottest month ever
Weeks of scorching summer heat in North America, Europe, Asia and elsewhere are putting July on track to be Earth’s warmest month on record, the European Union climate monitor said Thursday, the latest milestone in what is emerging as an extraordinary year for global temperatures.
Last month, the planet experienced its hottest June since records began in 1850.
July 6 was its hottest day. And the odds are rising that
2023 will end up displacing 2016 as the hottest year.
At the moment, the eight warmest years on the books are the past eight.
The world has entered what forecasters warn could be a multiyear period of exceptional warmth, one in which the warming effects of humankind’s continuing emissions of heat-trapping gases are compounded by El Niño, the recurring climate pattern typically associated with hotter conditions in many regions.
Even so, when global average temperatures shatter records by such large margins, as they have been doing since early June, it raises questions about whether the climate is also being shaped by other factors, said Karen McKinnon, a climate scientist and statistician at the University of California, Los Angeles. These elements might be less-well understood than global warming and El Niño.
“Do we expect, given those two factors, the record to be broken by this much? Or is this a case where we don’t expect it?” McKinnon said. “Is there some other factor that we’re seeing come into play?”
Researchers who analyzed this month’s punishing heat waves in the U.S. Southwest, northern Mexico and Southern Europe said this week that the temperatures observed in those regions, over a span of so many days, would have been “virtually impossible” without the influence of human-driven climate change.