Now that July’s sizzling numbers are all in, the European climate monitoring organization made it official: Last month was Earth’s hottest month on record by a wide margin.
Last month’s global average temperature of 16.95oC was one-third of a degree Celsius higher than the previous record set in 2019, Copernicus Climate Change Service, a division of the EU’s space program, announced yesterday.
Normally, global temperature records are broken by hundredths or a tenth of a degree, so this margin is unusual.
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“These records have dire consequences for both people and the planet exposed to ever more frequent and intense extreme events,” Copernicus deputy director Samantha Burgess said.
There have been deadly heat waves in the southwestern US 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 last month were hotter than previously recorded from July 2 on. It was so warm that Copernicus and the World Meteorological Organization made the unusual early announcement that it was likely the hottest month days before it ended. Yesterday’s calculations made it official.
The month was 1.5oC warmer than pre-industrial times. In 2015, countries agreed to try to prevent long-term warming — not individual months or even years, but decades — that is 1.5oC warmer than pre-industrial times.
Last month was so hot, it was 0.7oC hotter than the average July from 1991 to 2020, Copernicus said.
The worlds oceans were half a degree Celsius warmer than the previous 30 years and the North Atlantic was 1.05oC hotter than average. Antarctica set record lows for sea ice, 15 percent below average for this time of year.
Copernicus’ records go back to 1940. That temperature would be hotter than any month the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has recorded and their records go back to 1850.
However, scientists say it is 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 10,000 years,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research in Germany.
He was not 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,” Imperial College of London climate scientist Friederike Otto said. “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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