July on course to be hottest month ever recorded, climate scientists say
- Past two weeks have seen freak heat in Canadian Arctic, crippling droughts in India and Zimbabwe and large forest fires in France and Indonesia
- If trends continue, temperatures this month will beat previous record from July 2017
Record temperatures across much of the world over the past two weeks could make July the hottest month ever measured on Earth, according to climate scientists.
The past fortnight has seen freak heat in the Canadian Arctic, crippling droughts in Chennai and Harare and forest fires that forced thousands of holidaymakers to abandon campsites in southern France and prompted the air force in Indonesia to fly cloud-busting missions in the hope of inducing rain.
If the trends of the first half of this month continue, it will beat the previous record from July 2017 by about 0.025 degrees Celsius, according to calculations by Karsten Haustein, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford, and others.
This follows the warmest-ever June, which was confirmed this week by data from the US space agency Nasa, following Europe’s Copernicus satellite monitoring system.
In response to the new numbers, Michael Mann, the director of the Earth System Science Centre at Pennsylvania State University, tweeted: “This is significant. But stay tuned for July numbers. July is the warmest month of the year globally. If this July turns out to be the warmest July (it has a good shot at it), it will be the warmest month we have measured on Earth.”