WASHINGTON — July has been so hot thus far that scientists calculate that this month will be the hottest globally on record and likely the warmest human civilization has seen, even though there are several days left to sweat through.
The World Meteorological Organization and the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service on Thursday proclaimed July's heat is beyond record-smashing. They said Earth's temperature has been temporarily passing over a key warming threshold: the internationally accepted goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degree Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.
Temperatures were 1.5 degrees warmer than pre-industrial times for a record 16 days this month, but the Paris climate accord aims to keep the 20- or 30-year global temperature average to 1.5 degrees. A few days of temporarily beating that threshold have happened before but never in July.
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July has been so off-the-charts hot with heat waves blistering three continents — North America, Europe and Asia — that researchers said a record was inevitable. The U.S. Southwest's all-month heat wave is showing no signs of stopping while also pushing into most of the Midwest and East with more than 128 million Americans — nearly 40% of the U.S. population — under some kind of heat advisory Thursday, according to the National Weather Service.
Washington won't be spared, and the heat index in the capital could reach 110 degrees Fahrenheit on Friday.
President Joe Biden announced new steps to protect workers — including a hazard alert notifying employers and employees about ways to stay safe from extreme heat — as well as measures to improve weather forecasts and make drinking water more accessible.
Noting that ocean temperatures near Miami topped 100 F, Biden said, "that's more like jumping in a hot tub than jumping into the ocean to ride a wave."
Citing federal data, Biden called extreme heat the No. 1 weather-related killer in the United States.
“Even those places that are used to extreme heat have never seen it as hot as it is now for as long as it's been," he said. “Even those who deny that we’re in the midst of a climate crisis can’t deny the impact of extreme heat is having on Americans."
Biden directed the Labor Department to increase inspections of potentially dangerous workplaces such as farms and construction sites and called for heightened enforcement of heat safety violations.
The department will issue a hazard alert notifying employers and employees about ways to stay protected from extreme heat, which has killed 436 workers since 2011, according to federal statistics.
The Biden administration plans to spend $7 million to develop more detailed weather predictions to anticipate extreme weather like heat waves, plus $152 million to boost drinking water infrastructure and climate resilience in California, Colorado and Washington.
Biden's bid to address the immediate effects of climate change come as he faces pressure from fellow Democrats and environmental groups to declare a climate "emergency," a step he so far resisted. The steps announced Thursday supplement his long-term agenda for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and deploying clean energy technology, policies that may not pay dividends for years while global temperatures continue to rise.
"Unless an ice age were to appear all of sudden out of nothing, it is basically virtually certain we will break the record for the warmest July on record and the warmest month on record," Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo told The Associated Press.
Scientists say such shattering of heat records is a harbinger for future climate-altering changes as the planet warms. Those changes go beyond just prolonged heat waves and include more flooding, longer-burning wildfires and extreme weather events that put many people at risk.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres pointed to the calculations and urged world leaders, in particular of rich nations, to do more to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases. Despite years of international climate negotiations and lofty pledges, greenhouse gas emissions continue to go up.
"Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning," Guterres told reporters in a New York briefing. "The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived."
Buontempo and other scientists said the records are from human-caused climate change augmented by a natural El Nino warming of parts of the central Pacific that changes weather worldwide.
However, Buontempo said ocean warming in the Atlantic also has been so high, there's even more at play. While scientists long predicted the world would continue to warm and have bouts of extreme weather, he said he was surprised by the spike in ocean temperatures and record-shattering loss of sea ice in Antarctica.
Copernicus calculated that through the first 23 days of July, Earth's temperature averaged 16.95 degrees Celsius, or 62.5 degrees Fahrenheit. That's nearly one-third of a degree Celsius — almost 0.6 degrees Fahrenheit — hotter than the previous record for the hottest month, July 2019.
Buontempo's team found 21 of the first 23 days of July were hotter than any previous days in the database.
"The last few weeks have been rather remarkable and unprecedented in our record" based on data that goes back to the 1940s, Buontempo said.
Independently, Karsten Haustein at Leipzig University did his own calculations, using forecasts that show at best the warming may weaken a tad at the end of month, and came to the conclusion that July 2023 will pass the old record by 0.2 degrees Celsius, or 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit.
"It's way beyond everything we see," Haustein said in his own news briefing. "We are in absolutely new record territory."
