The month of July 2023 will probably be the hottest month in “hundreds, if not thousands of years”warned renowned NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt on Thursday during a briefing with journalists.
Several daily temperature records have already been broken this month, according to monitoring tools from the European Union and the University of Maine, which combine ground and satellite data in models to generate preliminary estimates.
Although they differ slightly from each other, the trend of the extreme heat it is undeniable and will probably be reflected in the more complete monthly reports that will be published later by the US agencies, Schmidt said in the meeting with the press.
“We are seeing unprecedented changes around the world: the heat waves that we are seeing in the United States, Europe and China are sweeping records left and right“, he added.
What’s more, these effects cannot be attributed solely to the weather pattern of the El Niño phenomenon, a recurring weather event linked to the warming of the equatorial Pacific Ocean, which “really just appeared,” continued the climatologist.
Although El Niño plays a small role, the scientist explained: “What we are seeing is widespread warming, pretty much everywhere, especially in the oceans. We have been recording record sea surface temperatures for many months, even outside the tropics.”
“We anticipate that this is going to continue, and the reason we think it is going to is because we continue to introduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” he warned.
What is currently happening is increasing the chances that 2023 will also be the hottest year ever recorded, to which Schmidt currently assigns a “50-50 probability,” although he clarified that other scientists put it at 80%.
“But we anticipate that 2024 will be an even warmer year, because we’re going to start with that El Niño event that’s building now, peaking towards the end of this year,” he said.
Schmidt’s warnings come at a time when the world has been rocked by fires and severe health alerts in the past week, in addition to new temperature records.