The hottest month ever
July 2023: we are living through Earth’s warmest three-week period on record. A round-the-world media tour to enter the narrative of the period that will mark the history of the climate change public discourse. At least until the next record is broken.
“If it were a sports competition, thoughts would immediately turn to doping. In fact, never have so many records fallen all together. The record for the hottest day, warmest month and most ice-poor Antarctica set between June and July is not a performance for everyone. Better than the weather this year, only Michael Phelps did”. In an article pubblished by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, the journalist Elena Dusi uses a sharp analogy to summarize the last, unnatural, month.
July started with the daily global mean surface air temperature record being broken on four days in a row, from 3–6 July. All days since then have been hotter than the previous record of 16.80°C, set on 13 August 2016. The hottest day was 6 July, when the global average temperature reached 17.08°C, and the values recorded on 5 and 7 July were within 0.01°C of this. This means that the first three weeks of the month was the warmest three-week period on record. During the first and third weeks, temperatures also temporarily exceeded the 1.5°C threshold above preindustrial level — a limit set in the Paris Agreement. ERA5 data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service also show that the global mean surface air temperature for the first 23 days of July was 16.95°C. This is well above the 16.63°C recorded for the full month of July 2019, which is the current hottest July and hottest month in the ERA5 record. It is almost certain that, in due course, data will show July 2023 to break both these records.
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