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28-07-2023
TOKYO/ MADRID: United Nations (UN) and European Union (EU) monitors said Thursday that July was set to be the hottest month in recorded history, warning that this was a taste of the world’s climate future.
Searing heat intensified by global warming has baked parts of Europe, Asia and North America this month, combined with wildfires that have scorched across Canada and parts of southern Europe.
“The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived,” UN chief Antonio Guterres told reporters in New York.
With the first three weeks of July already registering global average temperatures above any comparative period, the World Meteorological Organization and Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said it is “extremely likely” that July 2023 will be the hottest month on records going back to the 1940s.
Carlo Buontempo, Director of C3S, said the temperatures in the period had been “remarkable”, with an anomaly so large that scientists are confident the record has been shattered even before the month ends.
Beyond these official records, he said proxy data for the climate going back further like tree rings, or ice cores suggests the temperatures seen in the period could be “unprecedented in our history in the last few thousand years”.
Possibly even longer “on the order of 100,000 years,” he said.
About 1.2 degrees Celsius of global warming since the late 1800s, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, has made heatwaves hotter, longer and more frequent, as well as intensifying other weather extremes like storms and floods.
Harsh reality of climate change
The WMO has said the eight years to 2022 were the warmest on record, despite the cooling effects of the La Nina weather pattern. That has now given way to the warming El Nino, although this is not expected to strengthen until later in the year.
“The extreme weather which has affected many millions of people in July is, unfortunately, the harsh reality of climate change and a foretaste of the future,” said WHO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas. (Int’l News Desk)
