The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
Main Topic: Globally July 2023 Is Set to Be the Hottest Month on Record
Dear Diary. If you have been looking at my news feed with a myriad of items linked daily below my main topic of each diary post, you might have noticed that there have been several articles stating that July 2023 was by far the warmest average month globally in recorded history. This is an ominous global record set by a wide margin, coming in at about +1.5°C above preindustrial conditions for the first time. Of course, we have been chastened as a species to not go over +1.5C degrees above preindustrial conditions for global averages lest our livable climate get way out of whack. Today I will acknowledge and highlight this event on today’s main topic of the day.
This statistic should serve as both a warning and marker to spur everyone to work very hard to limit carbon pollution from going into the atmosphere.
Here are more details from Popular Science via Desdemona Despair:
By Laura Baisas
31 July 2023
(Popular Science) – Scientists are already calculating that July 2023 will be the hottest month on record—and likely the warmest month that humanity has ever experienced. The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced late last week that this month’s heat was beyond record-smashing. The planet’s temperature, they report, has been temporarily passing over the crucial threshold of limiting global warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial temperatures.
This news comes as no surprise to the millions of people around the world facing extreme heat. Phoenix, Arizona is about to enter its 31st straight day of temperatures above 110 degrees. Parts of northwest China saw a record-breaking 126 degrees earlier this month, while southern Europe is seeing wildfires following an extreme heatwave. These global heat waves would be “virtually impossible” without climate change, according to an early analysis released last week by the World Weather Attribution initiative.
“We can say that the first three weeks of July have been the warmest three-week periods ever observed in our record,” Carlo Buentempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said via Zoom and in a statement. “This anomaly is so large with respect to other record-breaking months in our record that we are virtually certain that the month, the month as a whole, will become the warmest July on record, the warmest month on record, in all likelihood.”
Records like these generally track average air temperature across the entire world and are broken by hundredths of a degrees. However, the temperature for July’s first 23 days averaged 62.51 degrees, higher than the 61.93 degrees set in July 2019, according to the UN’s report. The data for these records goes back to 1940, but many scientists believe that it is almost certain that these recent readings are the warmest the Earth has been in 120,000 years, based on the data collected from coral reefs, deep sea sediment cores, and tree rings that paint a picture of past climates.
This news comes as no surprise to the millions of people around the world facing extreme heat. Phoenix, Arizona is about to enter its 31st straight day of temperatures above 110 degrees. Parts of northwest China saw a record-breaking 126 degrees earlier this month, while southern Europe is seeing wildfires following an extreme heatwave. These global heat waves would be “virtually impossible” without climate change, according to an early analysis released last week by the World Weather Attribution initiative.
Buontempo and other scientists believe that the steamy weather can be attributed to a combination of human-caused climate change and this year’s natural El Niño warming pattern in parts of the central Pacific. This pattern changes weather around the world and follows three straight years of La Niña, a Pacific cooling pattern. Despite multiple La Niña cooling patterns, 2015 to 2022 saw eight of the warmest years on record based on a 173 year-long dataset. WMO’s Director of Climate Services Chris Hewitt cited “a clear and dramatic warming decade on decade” since the 1970s.
“But now the La Niña has ended” – to be replaced by the sea-warming El Niño effect – waters have begun to heat up in the tropical Pacific, bringing the “almost certain likelihood that one of the next five years will be the warmest on record,” Hewitt said in a statement. [more]
July 2023 was likely the hottest month in 120,000 years
More:
Here are some other “ET’s” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is more brand-new July 2023 climatology:
Here is more climate and news from Thursday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)