Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Three days before the month of August begins, the United Nations has said July 2023 was the “hottest month” ever recorded worldwide.
Some experts believe that July might well be the warmest month in the past 120,000 years.
Amid blistering heatwaves in several countries, July is “virtually certain” to be the world’s warmest month on record, scientists said, adding this extra heat is because of fossil fuel use.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the planet is entering an “era of global boiling.”
US President Joe Biden described climate change as an “existential threat” and that no one “can deny the impact of climate change anymore.”
The planet’s warmest day occurred on July 6, and the hottest 23 days ever recorded were all this month, the media reported on Friday, quoting the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Their provisional average temperature for the first 25 days of the month was 16.95C, which was well above the 16.63C figure for the whole of July 2019.
According to Dr. Karsten Haustein from the University of Leipzig, July 2023 will be 1.3C-1.7C above the average July temperatures recorded before the widespread use of fossil fuels. “Not only will it be the warmest July, but the warmest month ever in terms of absolute global mean temperature,” he said in a statement.
“We may have to go back thousands if not tens of thousands of years to find similarly warm conditions on our planet.”
While July is likely to be the warmest in records dating back around 150 years or so, some researchers said the final temperature may be the warmest in tens of thousands of years.
“The extreme weather which has affected many millions of people in July is, unfortunately, the harsh reality of climate change and a foretaste of the future,” said the World Meteorological Organization’s Secretary-General Prof Petteri Taalas.
“The need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is more urgent than ever before,” he said, adding “Climate action is not a luxury but a must.”
Apart from the ongoing impact of greenhouse gases, the growing effect of the El Nino weather system, a natural event where oceans warm up in the east Pacific, also releases additional heat into the atmosphere. This might push temperatures even higher and may make 2023 or 2024 the warmest year yet recorded because scientists warn we’re yet to see its full impacts.
In 2015, nearly 200 countries signed up to the Paris Climate Agreement, wherein they pledged to try to keep long-term global temperature rises to 1.5C above the pre-industrial period – before humans started burning fossil fuels at scale.
According to some scientists, however, while the July temperatures are worrying, extreme temperatures in a single month do not mean that international climate agreements have been broken.
“That does not mean we reach or breach the Paris goal or 1.5C because that is understood as the long-term increase in global warming,” Dr. Friederike Otto, a climate scientist from Imperial College London, said.
Limiting warming to 1.5C is seen as key to avoiding the most dangerous impacts of climate change.
But, as the recent heat waves have shown, the consequences of climate change increase with every fraction of a degree of warming.