The average temperature of 61.86 degrees Fahrenheit was 0.14 degrees higher than the previous record, set in July 1998.
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The record comes after NOAA and the U.S. space agency NASA said in January that 2014 was the Earth’s hottest on record, a fact used by the White House and the United Nations to make the case for immediate action to combat climate change.
The post July 2015 was Earth’s hottest month on record appeared first on PBS NewsHour. And, the globe is well on its way to having its hottest year on record.
According to the Met Office, the UK had its warmest July day ever on July 1, when temperatures hit 36.7 C near London. Other months have come close – this January was the second-warmest on record and April was third-warmest. This natural phenomenon, which appears as a large swathe of warm water in the Pacific every few years, is known to push up global temperatures.
Yup, we’re under an El Nino advisory in the Northern Hemisphere.
“We’ve recently seen record temperatures in the ocean, a record increase in sea levels and record glacial melting worldwide”, Blunden said, adding that extreme weather phenomena such as “droughts, heat waves and flooding” are increasingly severe.
Weather monitoring data stretches back more than 135 years, to 1880.
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When scientists looked at temperatures for the year-to-date, they found land and ocean surfaces were 1.53 F above the 20th century average. It’s always warm when we have an El Nino year. And an Iranian city had a heat index (the “feels like” temperature) of 165 degrees, which was still not quite record. With a strong El NIño in the forecast, this will likely help keep 2015 in the top 10 years for record setting global warmth.
