July was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth

It’s official: July 2019 was the warmest month worldwide on record, narrowing beating July 2016, a European climate agency announced on Monday.

Global temperatures last month eclipsed those in July 2016 by 0.07 degrees and were 1.01 degrees hotter than the average July from 1981 through 2010, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said.

“The global temperature was substantially above average in July 2019, sufficient for the month to become by a narrow margin the warmest July in this data record,” the agency said in a statement. “July 2016 was previously the warmest of any month on record in absolute terms. It has now been surpassed by July 2019, albeit by a margin that is small compared with the typical differences between datasets for previous Julys.”

The news was not entirely unexpected, as climate experts predicted late last week that July had a good shot to become the hottest month on record, with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres telling reporters Thursday that data from the World Meteorological Organization showed it “at least equaled” if not surpassed that distinction.

“This is even more significant because the previous hottest month, July 2016, occurred during one of the strongest El Niños ever,” Guterres said.

But that wasn’t the case this year, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, meaning the record was achieved without the natural warming of the Pacific Ocean that boosts the Earth’s average temperature.

The four-year period between 2015 and 2018 has been the four warmest years worldwide on record — and every month of 2019 has ranked among the four hottest for the month in question, according to Copernicus data.

“Putting July 2019 into the bigger picture, the month was close to 1.2 Celsius above the pre-industrial level, as defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” the agency said in a statement.

That mark is approaching the threshold set in 2016 by world leaders in Paris to keep the globe from warming no more than 2.4 degrees compared to pre-industrial levels.

Guterres, meanwhile, told reporters last week that record-shattering temperatures from Alaska to France were “just the tip of the iceberg” of extreme weather events to come unless nations across the world start getting serious about tackling climate change.

“And the iceberg is also rapidly melting,” Guterres said.

With Post wires