July will be the hottest month in Earth’s history for as long as records exist. The average temperature has been 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, that is, what the planet was before it was heated by the burning of coal, oil and gas, and other human activities.
And not only that, according to a study by Karsten Haustein, a climatologist at the University of Leipzig (Germany), we could be enduring not only the hottest July since the first records of 1880, but also the hottest in 120,000 years, when forests they were reaching the Arctic Circle, the sea level was twenty to thirty feet higher, and hippos and elephants roamed what would one day be London.
Using global temperature data from Berkeley Earth as a reference, the temperature of July 2023 will be more than 0.2°C higher than that of July 2019, the warmest month on record, setting a new temperature record. global. Although other climatologists have already warned that July would likely be the hottest month ever recorded, Haustein’s analysis is the first to confirm this and estimate the average temperature for the month.
The data recorded by ERA5 from the EU-funded Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) is on track to be the same as Haustein’s. At the moment he assures that the first three weeks of July have been the warmest three-week period ever recorded. Its consequences have been the heat waves registered in a large part of North America, Asia and Europe, as well as the serious forest fires in countries like Canada and Greece, which have had a great impact on people’s health, the environment and the economies of the world.
“The era of global warming is over, now is the time for the era of global boiling,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres pointedly warned. “Climate change is here. It’s terrifying. And this is just the beginning,” he stressed.
On July 6, according to C3S, the average daily global surface air temperature surpassed the record set in August 2016, becoming the hottest day ever recorded, with July 5 and 7 the second and Third place. Since May, adds this organization, the global average temperature of the sea surface has been well above the values ??previously observed for the time of year; contributing to this exceptionally warm July.
“Extreme weather affecting millions is unfortunately the harsh reality of climate change and a foretaste of the future,” said World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Secretary-General Petteri Taalas. “Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is more urgent than ever. Climate action is not a luxury but an obligation,” he concludes.
The WMO predicts that there is a 98% chance that at least one of the next five years will be the warmest on record.
The medieval warm period, around AD 900-1300, used to be used as the most recent hot reference in time, but the truth is that the last of the major warm periods that the Earth experienced was the Eemian period, and it took place 130,000 years ago. to 115,000 years, shortly before the last Ice Age. Paleoclimatic studies confirm that the temperature in Greenland was about 5 ºC higher than today. If the Earth’s average temperature continued to rise at the rate it is currently doing, we would reach that record around the year 2100.
In an interview with AFP in Nairobi, Jim Skea, elected on Wednesday as the new chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said instead that it is essential to offer humanity “positive” tools to deal with climate change. climate change, and not just “catastrophic messages that can create a feeling of existential terror”.
The fact that the average temperature rise this month has been 1.5°C above does not mean that governments have definitively failed in their attempt to limit warming to the 1.5°C limit set in the Paris Agreement. , the Haustein study reports, since mean warming is measured on a longer-term time scale.
It is also not the first time that a month has been 1.5 °C or more than the pre-industrial average. It already happened in 2016 and 2020, although it is the first time that it has happened in the summer of the northern hemisphere when the planet is warmer. That is why the study believes that you would probably have to go back 120,000 years to find these conditions. But since the temperature records are not precise enough, it cannot be argued with complete certainty that this month of July was the hottest of this interglacial era.
The fact that this month’s temperature increase is at the long-term agreed maximum level reflects that, although the limit has not yet been exceeded, measures to reduce emissions are still insufficient, concludes this study, and the world is on track to renege on the agreement.
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