London: Scientists have said that July is “virtually certain” to be the world’s warmest month on record amid scorching heat waves across the globe.
With the blistering heat, the scientists are confident that the 2019 record will be broken, reports the BBC.
Some weather experts have also said that this July might be the warmest month in the past 120,000 years.
According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the world’s warmest day occurred on July 6, and the hottest 23 days ever recorded were all this month.
The Service’s provisional average temperature for the first 25 days of the month is 16.95 degrees Celsius, which is well above the 16.63 degrees figure for the whole of July 2019.
Scientists have attributed the extra heat to fossil fuel use.
Karsten Haustein from the University of Leipzig calculated that July 2023 will be 1.3C-1.7 degrees above the average July temperatures recorded before the widespread use of fossil fuels.
“Not only will it be the warmest July, but the warmest month ever in terms of absolute global mean temperature,” the BBC quoted Haustein as saying in a statement.
“We may have to go back thousands if not tens of thousands of years to find similarly warm conditions on our planet.”
While July is likely to be the warmest in records dating back around 150 years or so, some researchers believe the final temperature may be the warmest in tens of thousands of years.
To work out these ancient figures, scientists use records like the air trapped in polar ice cores, or sediments in the deep ocean. These capture a signal of the climate at the time.
From this evidence, while scientists cannot pinpoint specific months going that far back, they say the last time the world was similarly warm was about 120,000 years ago — when sea levels were around 8m higher than today.
“The extreme weather which has affected many millions of people in July is unfortunately the harsh reality of climate change and a foretaste of the future,” the BBC quoted World Meteorological Organization’s Secretary-General Prof Petteri Taalas as saying.
“The need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is more urgent than ever before… Climate action is not a luxury but a must.”
–IANS