High heat records likely to continue due to climate change - KCRA Sacramento
High heat records likely to continue due to climate change
Global average temperature reached preliminary new record high on July 4, 2023. That record was tied again on July 5.
Last week was likely Earth's hottest on record, according to a statement from the World Meteorological Organization.
On July 4, the global average temperature reached a preliminary record of 62.9 degrees Fahrenheit. That record was tied the following day, July 5.
Both days were half a degree warmer than the previous global high-temperature record, which was set in August 2016.
A half of a degree may not seem like much, but National Weather Service climate scientist Brian Brettschneider said that when you're talking about a global record, even small increases are remarkable.
"It takes a large confluence of factors to come together to raise the temperature of an entire planet," Brettschneider said. "If you do the math on how much energy there is in one-tenth of a degree Fahrenheit over the span of the entire planet, it’s an astronomically large amount of energy."
A developing El Niño, record-low Antarctic ice cover and regional heat waves contributed to last week's record. Those factors are all relatively short-term, occurring in time scales of days to months.
But climate change, which is being driven by human greenhouse gas emissions, is working in the background to raise the floor on those seasonal factors.
“Now the background state of the atmosphere is just warmer than it used to be. And there’s lots of evidence that points to that," Brettschneider said. "And so when we have these little day-to-day variations now since we’re starting at a much warmer baseline, in any given day, we’re much more likely to set a record.”
According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Earth's global average temperature has risen 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit since the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s.
The WMO recently confirmed that June of 2023 was Earth's hottest June on record. This was aided by unusually warm water in the North Atlantic. This warming is unrelated to the developing El Niño, which is marked by warmer-than-average water in the East Pacific.
Data showing last week's record warmth is still considered preliminary, but several sources show similar results, including the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Center, the University of Maine's "Climate Reanalyzer," and a reanalysis project being run in Japan.
Scientists with the World Meteorological Organization will review the data to confirm the record later this year.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.