Thousands of visitors fled wildfires on the Greek island of Rhodes this week, and many more endured blistering heat across the US Southwest, amid what experts now call the world’s warmest month on record. According to a study released on Thursday by Germany’s Leipzig University, the average worldwide temperature in July 2023 will be around 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) higher than the pre-industrial norm.
According to European Union data, this would be at least 0.2C (0.4F) warmer than July 2019, the previous front-runner in the 174-year observational record. The gap between now and July 2019 is “so significant that we can already say with absolute certainty that it is going to be the warmest July,” Leipzig climate scientist Karsten Haustein said.
According to Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, it was evident by mid-July that it would be a record-warm month, and that it was an “indicator of a planet that will continue to warm as long as we burn fossil fuels.”
July 2023 likely to be the hottest month in history
The global mean temperature for July is typically approximately 16 degrees Celsius (61 degrees Fahrenheit), including the Southern Hemisphere winter. However, it has risen to approximately 17C (63F) this July. What’s more, “we may have to go back thousands if not tens of thousands of years to find similarly warm conditions on our planet,” Haustein said. Early, less precise climate data derived from ice cores and tree rings indicate that the Earth has not been this hot in 120,000 years.
Haustein’s study is based on preliminary temperature data and weather models, including anticipated temperatures until the end of this month, but it has been checked by experts who are not involved with the company. The United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO) also stated on Thursday that July 2023 was “extremely likely” to break the record, but would not declare it until all finalized data was available.
“July is almost certainly the hottest month in the instrumental record,” said Piers Forster, a climate scientist at Leeds University in Britain. “The result is confirmed by several independent datasets combining measurements in the ocean and over land. It is statistically robust.”
Hothouse Planet
Sweltering temperatures have afflicted large areas of the globe. While nights in the desert are normally cooler, Death Valley in the United States state of California experienced the hottest night ever recorded internationally this month. Temperatures in a northwest China municipality reached 52.2 degrees Celsius (126 degrees Fahrenheit), exceeding the national record.
Wildfires in Canada are spreading at an alarming rate. And France, Spain, Germany, and Poland were scorched by a massive heatwave, with temperatures reaching the mid-40s on the Italian island of Sicily, a portion of which is engulfed in flames. This is “the harsh reality of climate change and a foretaste of the future,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.
The ocean is also in heated water
Marine heatwaves have occurred off the coasts of Florida and Australia, raising concerns about coral reef depletion. Even Antarctica, one of the coldest areas on the planet, is feeling the heat. Sea ice is currently at an all-time low in the Southern Hemisphere’s winter when it should be at its largest extent.
Meanwhile, South Korea, Japan, India, and Pakistan have experienced unprecedented rainfall and flooding. “Global mean temperature (itself) doesn’t kill anyone,” said Friederike Otto, a scientist with the Grantham Institute for Climate Change in London. “But a ‘hottest July ever’ manifests in extreme weather events around the globe.”
The world is experiencing the early phases of an El Nino event, which is caused by exceptionally warm seas in the eastern Pacific. El Nino normally brings warmer temperatures to the planet, double the warming caused by man-made climate change, which experts warned this week played an “absolutely overwhelming” influence in July’s catastrophic heatwaves.
While El Nino’s impacts are expected to peak later this year and into 2024, it “has already started to help boost the temperatures”, said Haustein. Scientists expect 2023 or 2024 will end up as the hottest year in the record books, surpassing 2016.