Istafa Ali
Thursday, monitors from the UN and the EU talking about Climate Change News said that July is likely to be the hottest month ever recorded. They warned that this is a taste of what the world’s climate will be like in the future.
This month, parts of Europe, Asia, and North America have been baking in sweltering heat that has been made worse by global warming and climate change. Canada and parts of southern Europe have also been burned by wildfires.
“The time of global warming is over. Now is the time of global boiling,” Antonio Guterres, the head of the UN, told reporters in New York.
World Meteorological Organisation and Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) talking about latest Climate change news said it is “extremely likely” that July 2023 will be the hottest month since records began in the 1940s. This is because the average temperature for the first three weeks of July was already higher than any comparable period.
Carlo Buontempo, Director of C3S, talking about latest Climate change said that the temps during the time were “remarkable,” with an anomaly so big that experts are sure the record has been broken even before the month is over.
Outside of these government records, he said that data like tree rings and ice cores, which show how the climate change over a longer period of time, suggest that the temperatures during this time could have been “unprecedented in our history in the last few thousand years.”
“On the order of 100,000 years,” he said, it could be even longer.
Since the late 1800s, burning fossil fuels has caused global warming to rise by about 1.2 degrees Celsius. This has made heatwaves hotter, last longer, and happen more often. It has also made storms and floods worse.
Climate change is a harsh fact
Even though La Nina brought cooler weather, the WMO said that the eight years leading up to 2022 were the hottest on record. That has been replaced by El Nino, which is getting warmer, but it won’t get stronger until later in the year.
WHO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas talking about latest Climate change news said, “The extreme weather that affected many millions of people in July is a harsh reality of climate change and a taste of what’s to come.”
The WMO says it is more likely than not that for at least one of the next five years, world temperatures will temporarily rise 1.5C above the pre-industrial standard.
They stress, though, that this would not be a lasting violation of the 1.5C cap on long-term warming set by the Paris Agreement.
Buontempo said that there had never been a month with so many days where the temperature was above 1.5C.
Nonstop heat wave
Temperature records have been broken all over the northern hemisphere this month, and many places have been very hot for weeks.
President Joe Biden held a conference at the White House with mayors of cities like Phoenix, Arizona, which is suffering through a brutal 27-day streak of days above 43 degrees Celsius (110 degrees Fahrenheit), to talk about the effects of the extreme heat and Climate Change.
He also talked about ways to make sure workers, especially farmers, building workers, and others who work outside, are safe in hot weather.
In Beijing, the government told older people to stay inside and told children to play outside less to protect them from the heat and ozone pollution at ground level.
Extreme heat has left the land in the Mediterranean area as dry as straw.
Hundreds of firefighters in Greece are working hard to put out dangerous flames that have been burning for two weeks in different parts of the country.
Copernicus and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) talking about latest Climate change said that the unusually warm July was caused by average sea surface temperatures that have been much higher than usual since May.
Buontempo said that “a significant swathe” of the central Mediterranean is now close to or above all previous records.
Copernicus says that July 2019 was the hottest month before that. The final results will be released in early August.
The Climate Change Reality: A Call to Action
Scientists from the World Weather Attribution group found this week that the heatwaves in parts of Europe and North America would have been almost “impossible” without climate change.
They found that global warming made temperatures in China 50 times more possible.
