Record July heat prompts dire warning: Act now ‘or we all scorch and fry’

July will be the hottest month ever recorded, and may be the hottest month in 120,000 years, with an average temperature about 1.5 degrees hotter than the planet was before it began to warm with greenhouse gas emissions during the industrial revolution.

After searing and slow-moving heatwaves in Asia, Europe and North America, July will be around 0.2 degrees warmer than the previous hottest July, experienced in 2019 before Australia’s Black Summer bushfires, according to a new analysis by Dr Karsten Haustein, a University of Leipzig scientist specialising in the attribution of extreme weather events to climate change.

A man tries to cool off at a fountain in Berlin, Germany on a day where the temperature reached 37 degrees celsius this month.Credit: Getty Images

Haustein’s analysis confirms earlier predictions by climate scientists and is based on temperature data gathered from around the world by the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Not only will it be the warmest July, but the warmest month ever in terms of absolute global mean temperature. We may have to go back thousands – if not tens of thousands – of years to find similarly warm conditions on our planet,” he said.

“The record comes as El Nino has just been declared in the tropical Pacific. While contributing to the warmth, the fundamental reason for why we are seeing such records is the continued release of vast amounts of greenhouse gases by humans.”

Since the full impact of the El Nino is yet to emerge, records are likely to continue to fall until early 2024, he said.

Professor Mark Howden, director of the Institute for Climate, Energy & Disaster Solutions at the Australian National University, has looked at the data used for the analysis and said that breaking temperature records by 0.2 degrees was extraordinary, likening it to an athlete breaking a world record by seconds rather than tenths of a second.

“I think over the next few years [July 2023] will be seen as a big trigger for action, but very quickly on this trajectory, these months will actually be seen as relatively benign,” he said.

Under the Paris Agreement of 2015, the world agreed to pursue efforts to limit the world’s average temperature increase to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels because the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change research suggested that crossing that threshold risked unleashing far more severe climate change impacts, including more frequent and severe droughts, heatwaves and rainfall.

Under the terms of the agreement, 1.5 degrees of heating must be sustained for a period of 20 years.

The former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres said this month’s heat showed that targeted national policies to cut emissions must be immediately adopted “or we all scorch and fry”.

“The much-used term ‘unprecedented’ no longer describes the horrific temperatures we are experiencing,” she said.

“G20 nations are confronted with a dangerous reality they must decisively address with policies to accelerate the deployment of renewables and prudent phase-out of fossil fuels. One-third of global electricity can be produced by solar and wind alone, but targeted national policies have to enable that transformation.”

Polly Hemming, director of the Australia Institute’s climate and energy program, said though Australia was not in the firing line of high temperatures this month, its fossil fuel exports were fuelling the record temperatures.

“In the same week the world was experiencing the highest global temperature ever recorded, our government approved a thermal coal mining project to run until 2045.

“The emissions from this single project will be the equivalent to running a coal-fired power station for 15 years. Australia could be an exporter of wind and solar, instead it is an exporter of destruction.”

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