JAKARTA - July 2023 will be the hottest month in the world, said UN Secretary-General Ant bigio Guterres, after scientists said this month would be the hottest month in the world.
The United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service also said in a joint statement, "very likely" July 2023 would break the record.
"We don't have to wait until the end of the month to find out. In the next few days, July 2023 will break records around the world," Guterres said in New York.
"Climate change has arrived. It's scary. And this is just the beginning," he told reporters, adding "the global era of education has arrived".
The impact of the heat of weather in July has been seen worldwide. Thousands of tourists fled forest fires on the island of Rhodes, Greece. The heat was intense across the US Southwest, while temperatures in a city in northwest China surged as high as 52.2C (126F), breaking national records.
Although WMO will not mention the record directly, it is waiting until all the data that has been completed in August, an analysis from Leipzig University, Germany, released on Thursday found that July 2023 would set a new record.
This month's average global temperature is projected to be at least 0.2C (0.4F) warmer than July 2019, which is the hottest temperature in 174-year observational records, according to EU data.
The difference between current and July 2019 is "very big so we can say with certainty, it will be the hottest July month," said Leipzig climate scientist Karsten Haustein.
July 2023 is expected to reach around 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial average. WMO has confirmed that the first three weeks of July have been the hottest on record.
Commenting on this pattern, Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said it was clear in mid-July, it would be the month with the hottest record, and become a "planet indicator that will continue to heat up as long as we burn fossil fuels".
Typically, the global average temperature for July is around 16C (61F), including winter in the Southern Hemisphere. However, this July, the air temperature soared to around 17C (63F).
What's more, "we may have to go back to thousands or even tens of thousands of years ago to find the same warm conditions on our planet," Haustein said.
Less accurate early climate records - collected from various things such as ice cores and tree rings - suggest that Earth was not this hot in 120,000 years.
Haustein's analysis is based on preliminary temperature data and weather models, including temperature estimates until the end of this month, but validated by unaffiliated scientists.
"The results are confirmed by several independent data sets that combine measurements at sea and on land. Statistically, these results are robust," said Piers Forster, a climate scientist at Leeds University in England.
"The global average temperature (it itself) doesn't kill anyone," said Friederike Otto, a scientist from the Grantham Institute for Climate Change in London.
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"However, the hottest 'July ever' manifested in extreme weather events around the world," he continued.
The Earth is in its early stages of the El Nino event, caused by the very warm seawater in the eastern Pacific. El Nino typically produces warmer temperatures around the world, doubling the warming caused by human-induced climate change, which scientists say this week has played a "very large" role in extreme heat waves in July.
Although El Nino's impact is expected to only peak by the end of this year and until 2024, El Nino "is starting to help increase temperature," Haustein said.
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