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| An awful lot of red on the global July temperature departure map. It was by far the world's hottest July on record. |
According to NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information:
"The July global surface temperate was 1.12 degrees C (2.02 degrees F) above the 20th-century average of 15.8 degrees C (60.4F). This marked the first time a July temperature exceeded 1.0 C (1.8F) above the long term average."
Since July is normally the hottest month of the year for the globe as a whole (despite the fact it's winter in the Souther Hemisphere), last month will not only be the hottest July on record, but the hottest of any month.
For those of you keeping track, July, 2023 was the 47th consecutive whose temperatures were above the 20th century average.
MARGINS AND BLAME
The global record for hottest July was broken by a strikingly large margin. NOAA's data indicated that July, 2023 was 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the previous record hottest July in 2019. That doesn't sound like much at all, but on a global basis, that's a huge margin. Until now, months that break the all time record for heat do so by exceeding the old mark by a few hundredths of a degree.
Other organizations also measure the Earth's monthly temperatures, and they come up with slightly different results from each other. Remember, these reports are just very, very close estimates. There's going to be variations.
NASA measured the different in temperature this July compared to 2019 as 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit. This would be the biggest margin by which a month exceeded the previous record high. Yeah, this is totally esoteric I get it, but it's really, really significant to climate watchers.
Almost everybody on Earth experienced a warmer than average July, but the toastiest spots, relative to average, were in northwestern and extreme northeastern Canada, parts of Alaska, Mexico, the southwestern United States, most of South America, northern Africa, southwestern Europe and roughly the area where Europe and Asia meet.
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| Global temperature trend for Julys since 1950. Click on the image to make it bigger and easier to read. |
For the fourth consecutive month, global ocean temperatures were the warmest on record.
Several factors combined to create our world's hottest July blame for the hot July to several factors, climate change being the biggie.
Berkeley Earth assigned about two thirds of the July warmth to climate change. Another one-sixth of the blame went to the currently intensifying El Nino, which tends to boost the world's temperature. They assigned the remaining one sixth of the global heat to a combination of a 2022 eruption on Tonga that ejected water vapor into the atmosphere, new shipping emissions regulations that reduced the amount of sulfur pollution, and a solar cycle.
In other words, without climate change, the world probably would have had a warmer than normal July, but not one that was over the top hot like this one.
LOOKING AHEAD
I fully expect the global heat to continue when we see the August data in about a month. I imagine August will either be the hottest on record or close to it. Climate change continues, and El Nino isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
Already this month, we've seen some big heat waves around the world. The southern United States heat wave continues to grind on. Houston just experienced its hottest seven-day period on record.
A new heat wave is blasting the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. Portland, Oregon reached 108 degrees Monday, the hottest August day on record there.
It's winter in South America, but temperatures on some part of the continent exceeded 100 degrees anyway in the past week or two. Numerous cities in Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Morocco and Cyprus just experienced their hottest-ever temperatures. Japan also had a record heat wave over the weekend.
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