July has been so hot that scientists calculate that this month will be the hottest globally on record and likely the warmest human civilization has seen, even though there are several days left remaining to sweat through. The World Meteorological Organization and the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service on Thursday proclaimed July's heat is beyond record-smashing, the AP reports. They said Earth's temperature has been temporarily passing over a key warming threshold: the internationally accepted goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degree Celsius—2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Some scientists calculate that this month is the hottest in about 120,000 years.
Temperatures were 1.5 degrees higher than in pre-industrial times for a record 16 days this month, but the Paris climate accord aims to keep the 20- or 30-year global temperature average to 1.5 degrees. A few days of temporarily beating that threshold have happened before but never in July. This month has been so off-the-charts hot, with heat waves blistering three continents—North America, Europe and Asia—that researchers said a record was inevitable. The US Southwest's all-month heat wave is showing no signs of stopping while also pushing into most of the Midwest and East with more than 128 million Americans under some kind of heat advisory Thursday.
"Unless an ice age were to appear all of sudden out of nothing, it is basically virtually certain we will break the record for the warmest July on record and the warmest month on record," Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo told the AP. Scientists say that such shattering of records is a harbinger for future climate-altering changes as the planet warms. Those changes go beyond just prolonged heat waves and include more flooding, longer-burning wildfires, and extreme weather events that put many people at risk. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged world leaders, in particular of rich nations, to do more to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases. Despite years of international climate negotiations and lofty pledges from many countries and companies, greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.
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"Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning," Guterres told reporters in a New York briefing. "The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived." Buontempo and other scientists said the records are from human-caused climate change augmented by a natural El Nino warming of parts of the central Pacific that changes weather worldwide. Copernicus calculated that through the first 23 days of July, Earth's temperature averaged 16.95 degrees Celsius, 62.5 degrees Fahrenheit. That's nearly one-third of a degree Celsius (almost 0.6 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than the previous record for the hottest month, July 2019.
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