July was the hottest month in history, global temperature rose 2.16 degrees

The average monthly anomaly in global temperature was 2.16 degrees (1.2 Celsius) above pre-industrial levels, reported the Center Friday in its preliminary figures.

July was the hottest month in history, global temperature rose 2.16 degrees
The average monthly anomaly in global temperature was 2.16 degrees (1.2 Celsius) above pre-industrial levels, reported the Center Friday in its preliminary figures.
World | (c) 2019 the Washington Post | Andrew Freedman, The Washington Post | updated: 03 August, 2019 16:05 IST
July was the hottest month in history, global temperature rose 2.16 degrees

The July figures clearly indicate that the planet is already up against the lower threshold.

July was the hottest month on the planet ever recorded, "on an equal and perhaps slightly higher" compared to the previous hottest month, July 2016, according to provisional data provided by the Copernicus Climate Change Service. This European climate agency will have a full report for the whole month of July on Monday, but a spokesperson said that enough data (until 29 July) are already entered to make this statement.

The average monthly anomaly in global temperature was 2.16 degrees (1.2 Celsius) above pre-industrial levels, reported the Center Friday in its preliminary figures.

On Thursday, the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, quoted the data collected at a press conference as an example of why more ambitious action to reduce the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet is needed.
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As part of the Paris Climate Agreement, world leaders have pledged to prevent global warming by more than 3.6 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Celsius) and are seeking to limit global warming further to 2.4 degrees Celsius (1.5 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial levels.

The July figures clearly indicate that the planet is already up against the lower threshold. This also means that the world is heading towards the top 3 of the hottest years, having been ranked among the top 5 at the beginning of the year. The period from 2015 to 2019 will go down in history as the hottest five-year period ever recorded since the end of the 19th century and most likely long before.

The rise in temperature was largely due to record heat in western Europe, with remarkable heat spreading across the Arctic and culminating in one of the largest melting events ever recorded in Greenland at the end of the month.
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Iceberg floats in fjord near Tasiilaq, Greenland

Throughout July, the Greenland ice sheet dumped 197 billion tonnes of water into the North Atlantic in July alone, enough to raise sea level by 0.5 millimetres.

Notable extreme weather events in July included a widespread heat wave in western Europe that set national temperature records in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. Paris reached its highest temperature ever recorded, 108.7 degrees (42.6 degrees Celsius).

A study published on Friday by a group of researchers studying the possible role of climate change in extreme weather and climate phenomena revealed that climate change made this heat wave ten times more likely than a climate without an increase in greenhouse gases, in the form of carbon dioxide.

The report, published by World Weather Attribution, also revealed that by increasing average temperatures at the planet's surface, climate change increased heat wave temperatures to 5.4 degrees Celsius.

"The July 2019 heat wave was so extreme in continental Western Europe that the observed magnitudes would have been extremely unlikely without climate change," says the report, which has not been peer reviewed.

Elsewhere in July, Alaska had its hottest month ever recorded, and in the Arctic, a record-breaking outbreak of simultaneous large and persistent forest fires from Siberia to northern Alaska. These fires have consumed millions of acres and emitted large quantities of greenhouse gases, constituting a positive feedback loop due to the worsening of global warming.

The Arctic pack ice was at its lowest level for the month and it is possible, although not certain, that the extent of the pack ice in the Arctic will reach a record high in 2019. The previous record was set in 2012, and numerous scientific assessments show that the Arctic will be seasonally ice-free as early as the 2040s, as global warming continues, even if greenhouse gas emissions are reduced in the short term.

Copernicus, a European Union Climate services programme, publishes its monthly temperature ranking earlier than other temperature monitoring agencies such as NASA, and their ranking may also vary slightly. This is because they use a different source for their data.

The ranking was generated using so-called reanalysis records, which take the collected data for the weather forecasts and introduce many different observation variables into a weather model for each hour of each month.

Reanalysis data tend to allow for faster reporting of monthly global temperatures, but must nevertheless be verified using observational records collected from the networks of thousands of measurement sites worldwide.

These readings will be reported by NASA, NOAA and other agencies in the coming weeks, but they will probably not be very different from Copernicus.