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UN says July 2023 will be world’s hottest month ever recorded
Searing heat and wildfires intensified by global warming have baked oceans and swathes of Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa this month
Monitors from the United Nations and European Union on Thursday said July was set to be the world’s hottest month in recorded history, warning it was a taste of the world’s climate future.
Searing heat and wildfires intensified by global warming have baked oceans and swathes of Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa this month. With the first three weeks of this month already registering global average temperatures above any comparative period.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said it was “extremely likely that July 2023 will be the hottest July and also the hottest month on record.”
C3S director Carlo Buontempo said the temperatures this month have been “remarkable” in records going back to the 1940s, with an anomaly so large that scientists are confident the record has been shattered even before the month ends, AFP reported.
Beyond these official records, he said proxy data records for the climate record – like tree rings or ice cores – suggest the temperatures seen in the period could be "unprecedented in our history in the last few thousand years” and possibly even longer “on the order of 100,000 years,” he said.
About 34.16 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming since the late 1800s, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, has made heatwaves hotter, longer, and more frequent, as well as intensifying other weather extremes like storms and floods.
The WMO has said the eight years to 2022 were the warmest on record, despite the cooling effects of the La Nina weather pattern. That has now given way to the warming El Nino, although that is not expected to strengthen until later in the year.