July 2019 confirmed as hottest month ever recorded

July 2019 was the warmest month on record for the planet, according to scientists at the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Citing the Climate Change Programme, which analyses temperature data from around the planet, CNN reported that July was around 0.56 degC warmer than the global average temperature between 1981-2010.

That is slightly hotter than July 2016, when the world was on the receiving end of the El Nino effect, a warm ocean water current that occurs in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific, including the area off the Pacific coast of South America, in a span of every four years.

 

The effects of El Nino are characterised by warming of the ocean waters in the Pacific Ocean and have a pronounced warming effect on the Earth's average temperature.

Though there was a weak El Nino in place during the first part of 2019, it is transitioning to a more neutral phase, making the extreme July temperatures even more alarming.

The rising temperature continues a worrying upward trend in 2019, accompanied by a major ice melt in Greenland, with billions of tonnes of freshwater pouring into the Atlantic ocean during the month of July alone, scientists said.

Jean-Noel Thepaut, head of the Copernicus program, said, "While July is usually the warmest month of the year for the globe, according to our data it also was the warmest month recorded globally by a very small margin."

"With continued greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting impact on global temperatures, records will continue to be broken in the future," he added.

According to Copernicus, 2015 through 2018 have been the four warmest years on record. April, May and July this year all ranked among the warmest on record for those months, and this June was the hottest ever.

The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had warned last year that all countries across the world have until 2030 to avoid such catastrophic levels of global warming and called on governments to meet their obligations under the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement.

Intense heat waves have swept Europe this summer, breaking temperature records in at least a dozen countries. Scientists have warned that the world should expect more scorching heat waves and extreme weather due to climate change.

Wildfires raged across millions of acres in the Arctic. A massive ice melt event in Greenland sent hundreds of billions of tons of water pouring into the Atlantic Ocean, raising sea levels. And temperature records evaporated, one after another: 101.7 degrees Fahrenheit in Cambridge, England, and 108.7F in Paris. The same being in Germany.