Even with a few days left, analysts are optimistic that the month will break the 2019 record for heat.
The world is about to enter a “era of global boiling,” according to UN chief Antonio Guterres.
Most scientists concur that using fossil fuels is the main cause of the increased heat.
No one can “deny the impact of climate change anymore,” according to US Vice President Joe Biden, who called it a “existential threat.”
According to some analysts, July may very well have been the warmest month in the previous 120,000 years.
There have been several signs in recent weeks that the world is experiencing far larger levels of heating, so scientists are not shocked that July is on track to shatter the record for the warmest month.
According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the hottest 23 days ever recorded were all in this month, and July 6 was the world’s warmest day ever.
Their preliminary average temperature for the first 25 days of the month is 16.95C, which is much higher than the overall average temperature for July 2019 of 16.63C.The same conclusion has been reached by other analyses.
According to Dr. Karsten Haustein of the University of Leipzig, July 2023 will have average temperatures that are 1.3–1.7°C higher than those observed before the widespread use of fossil fuels. The best estimate is 1.5C. He is certain that even if the recent days have been cooler, there is still enough room for error to make this July the hottest ever recorded.
He declared in a statement that “not only will it be the warmest July, but the warmest month ever in terms of absolute global mean temperature.”
To discover equally warm circumstances on our planet, we might have to look back thousands, if not tens of thousands of years.
Researchers use readings from weather stations scattered throughout the world to calculate the global air temperature.Scientists feed all of these observations, along with some measures from the atmosphere itself, into computer models because there aren’t enough stations to provide a fully accurate global picture.
These enable the construction of a “map without gaps” by scientists, allowing for the accurate estimation of the earth’s temperature.
Even before the month is over, scientists can produce a trustworthy estimate of the global temperature by integrating these datasets with global weather forecasts for the upcoming few days.
Some analysts think the final temperature may be the highest in tens of thousands of years, even though July is expected to be the warmest month in data going back approximately 150 years.
Scientists utilize records like the air trapped in polar ice cores or sediments in the deep ocean to determine these old statistics. These record a signal of the prevailing weather.
This data suggests that the last time the earth was comparably warm was around 120,000 years ago, when sea levels were roughly 8 m higher than they are now and hippos were present as far north as Britain, even though scientists are unable to identify exact months that far back.
Researchers are sure that human activity-related emissions of fossil fuels are mostly to blame for the current levels of warming.According to Prof. Petteri Taalas, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization, “the extreme weather that affected many millions of people in July is unfortunately the harsh reality of climate change and a foretaste of the future.”
“The need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is more urgent than ever before,” he declared. “Climate action is not an option; it is a necessity.”
According to experts, this year’s record-breaking heat wave won’t end with the month of July.
Along with the continuing effects of greenhouse gases, the El Nio weather pattern, a phenomenon where waters warm in the east Pacific and transfer heat into the atmosphere, is also having an increasing impact. Given that scientists warn we have not yet seen the full effects of this, temperatures are anticipated to rise even further and might become the highest years ever recorded in 2023 or 2024.There are further causes that could have increased world temperatures.
The amount of pollutants emitted has decreased as a result of new shipping regulations, and Saharan dust concentrations in the sky were low until recently.
Although the science behind it is quite complex, these airborne particles, known as “aerosols,” normally reflect some of the sun’s energy back into space. There is speculation that the lack of these aerosols may have contributed slightly to the record North Atlantic temperatures.
Water vapour, which heats the earth similarly to carbon dioxide, has increased in the atmosphere as a result of the eruption of an undersea volcano in Tonga in 2022.
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