Topics: News, World News, Weather, Climate Change
July is set to be the world's hottest month in over 100,000 years.
New records have been set every day this month for average global annual temperatures, with climate scientists saying 17 days in July have been the hottest on record in 40 years of global observations.
“We’re just really starting to see climate change kick in,” Nathan Lenssen, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado focused on historical temperature data told The Washington Post.
“Seeing so many types of weather and climate extremes in a six-month period is pretty remarkable.”
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July has seen heatwaves sweeping Europe and the United States. An unprecedented wildfire season continues to rage in Canada, and floods have devastated parts of India, South Korea and Vermont.
Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth and the tech company Stripe, also told The Washington Post: “Given the extreme global temperatures over the first half of July, it is virtually certain that July will set a record both as the warmest July and as the warmest month in absolute terms since global temperature records began in the mid-1800s."
On Thursday, NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt told reporters at a press conference that July is likely to be the hottest month on record in 'hundreds, if not thousands, of years'.
Axios upped the ante and said there have been temperature spikes not seen in a whopping 125,000 years.
"We are seeing unprecedented changes all over the world, the heat waves that we're seeing in the US in Europe and in China are demolishing records, left, right and center," he said.
Schmidt added that the heat cannot be attributed solely to the El Nino weather pattern, which 'has really only just emerged'.
"What we're seeing is the overall warmth, pretty much everywhere, particularly in the oceans. We've been seeing record-breaking sea surface temperatures, even outside of the tropics, for many months now," he explained.
"And we will anticipate that is going to continue, and the reason why we think that's going to continue, is because we continue to put greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere."
The climatologist warned that things are only going to get worse in the coming years.
"But we anticipate that 2024 will be an even warmer year, because we're going to be starting off with that El Nino event that's building now, and that will peak towards the end of this year," he said.
Great, just great.
