Nearly 150 million people across the US are facing hazardous temperatures in a heatwave forecast to stretch from the Midwestern plains to the Atlantic coast. PHOTO: AFP/FILE
PARIS: July 2019 was the hottest month across the globe ever recorded, according to data released on Monday by the European Union's satellite-based Earth observation network.
"While July is usually the warmest month of the year for the globe, according to our data it also was the warmest month recorded globally, by a very small margin," Jean-Noel Thepaut, head of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said in a statement.
"With continued greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting impact on global temperatures, records will continue to be broken in the future."
Searing heatwaves saw records tumble across Europe last month, with unusually high temperatures within the Arctic Circle as well.
Temperatures averaged across July rose highest compared with a 1981-2010 benchmark in Alaska, Greenland, Siberia, central Asia, Iran and large swathes of Antarctica, Copernicus reported.
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Wild fires unprecedented in scope and intensity burned across parts of Siberia and Alaska, releasing more than 100 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, while Greenland's ice sheet shed billions of tonnes in melted ice daily.
Africa and Australia were also well above average across most of each continent.
Globally, July 2019 was marginally warmer -- by 0.04 degrees Celsius -- than the previous record-hot month, July 2016.
The new record is all the more notable because the 2016 record followed a strong El Nino, which boosts average global temperate beyond the impact of global warming alone.
Every month so far in 2019 ranks among the four warmest on record for the month in question, with June being the hottest June measured, the Copernicus team said in a press release.
"Typically, there is a difference between the values provided by the global temperature data sets of various institutions, and the Copernicus difference between July 2019 and 2016 temperatures is smaller than this margin," the agency said in a statement.
"We have always lived through hot summers, but this is not the summer of our youth. This is not your grandfather's summer," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said last week, announcing provisional findings from the World Meteorological Organization.
July 2019 will be around 1.2C warmer than the pre-industrial era, according to the data.
Europe has endured two exceptionally strong heat waves in a matter of weeks. Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands all also registered all-time high temperatures.
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