July set to be hottest month yet as UN warns of ‘global boiling’

July is ‘virtually certain’ to be the hottest month on record globally by a significant margin, the UN and a European science agency have said.

A wild fire in Agia Sotira, near Athens, around mid July as Europe sweltered under a relentless heatwave amid scorching global temperatures that have prompted health authorities to sound alarms from North America to Europe and Asia. Picture: AFP

July is “virtually certain” to be the hottest month on record globally by a significant margin, the United Nations and a European science agency have claimed.

The month started hot, with the warmest day yet recorded on July 6, when the global average temperature reached 17.08C. July’s first 23 days averaged a record 16.95C.

The previous title for both the warmest July and warmest month on record was 16.63C in July 2019.

The new highs have been driven by heatwaves across large parts of China, Europe and North America, as wildfires have raged near tourist hot spots in Rhodes in Greece and elsewhere in the Mediterranean. On Wednesday, the Greek island of Skyros hit a record 44.4C and Turkey’s third biggest city, Izmir, reached a record 43.2C.

A UN agency, the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization, declared earlier this month that El Nino, which is associated with above-average temperatures, had arrived. The phenomenon is one half of a cycle, with La Nina, that alternates every three to seven years, as trade winds in the Pacific weaken and strengthen, changing where warm water in the ocean ends up.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service, the European Union body that collated the latest temperature data, asserted that climate change is driving the heat. Antonio Guterres, the UN secretary-general, said: “The only surprise is the speed of the change. Climate change is here. It is terrifying.

“And it is just the beginning. The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.”

Although July is not over, Copernicus said it had been so unusually hot already that it was “extremely likely” to be the hottest month yet recorded. The temperatures are modelled figures of a global mean, based on observations from weather stations, satellites and ships around the world. The final verdict will be declared on August 8.

Although many will recall the long hot summer of 2022, the year was unusually mild for much of the time. Picture: Alamy/The Times

Brighton beach was packed during Britain’s hottest June since records began in 1884. Picture: Alamy/The Times

A man watches the setting sun in LA, California, as at least 13 US states braced for scorchers this week as the deadly heatwave in southwestern US was set to spread. Picture: AFP

An analysis by Karsten Haustein, a climate scientist at Leipzig University, also found that this month was the hottest yet, likely to be about 1.5C warmer than pre-industrial levels.

He said July had been “so outrageously warm” that the “result isn’t going to change” in the next few days.

Haustein, who used data from the University of Maine and forecasts, said that it may have been the warmest month since the Eemian interglacial period, about 120,000 years ago, based on data such as ice cores and tree rings before human records began.

The UN World Meteorological Organisation and Copernicus agreed that temperatures in July so far have been 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – the target for limiting global warming agreed by nearly 200 countries in the Paris agreement of 2015.

Temporarily overshooting 1.5C for a month does not mean the goal has been missed, however. That will be accepted only after two decades.

The Times