Last month was the hottest July ever recorded, with global mean surface air temperature for the first 23 days standing at 16.95C. Researchers say climate change, mainly caused by the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, was to blame for a hotter-than-usual July.
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More than 6.5 billion people – approximately 81% of the global population – experienced a hotter July, a new study has found.
The new report, released Wednesday by Climate Central, calculated climate change attribution assessments for 4,700 cities across 200 countries. Scientists concluded that more than four out of every five people on the planet faced climate change-attributed heat last month, which was also the hottest July ever recorded.
In particular, over 6.5 billion people experienced “at least one day” of heat that was amplified at least threefold by climate change. Moreover, during each day of the month, 2 billion people worldwide experienced at least that same level of climate change influence on their local temperatures.
Daily average temperature Climate Shift Index (CSI) averaged over July 1-31, 2023. The CSI has 11 levels indicating how climate change has altered the frequency of daily high, low, and average temperatures at a given location. For example, CSI Level 3 indicates that human-caused climate change made temperatures at least three times more likely. Image: Climate Central.
Last month saw historic heatwaves wreaking havoc around the world, from the southern United States and southern European countries including Italy and Greece to the Middle East and parts of South and Southeast Asia. Among the areas experiencing the strongest influence of anthropogenic climate change on temperatures were people living near the equator and small island developing states, including 11 in the Caribbean, the study found.
“By now, we should all be used to individual heat waves being connected to global warming,” Gabriel Vecchi, a Princeton University climate scientist, told the AP. “Unfortunately, this month, as this study elegantly shows, has given the vast majority of people on this planet a taste of global warming’s impact on extreme heat.”
The peak of the global heat was reached on July 6, the hottest day the planet ever recorded, with the average global temperature reaching 17.08C (62.74F).
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