July 22 hottest day ever recorded: climate monitor

PARIS — Earth withered through a second straight day of record-breaking heat on July 22, the EU's climate monitor said on Wednesday, as large parts of Europe, Asia and North America suffer blistering temperatures.

Preliminary data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, or C3S, showed the daily global average temperature was 17.15 C on Monday, the warmest day in records going back to 1940.

This was 0.06 C hotter than the day before on July 21, which itself broke by a small margin the all-time high temperature set a year earlier.

Copernicus, which uses satellite data to update global air and sea temperatures close to real-time, said its figures were provisional and final values may differ very slightly.

The monitor had anticipated daily records would be exceeded as summer peaks in the northern hemisphere, and the planet endures a particularly long streak of extreme global heat driven by human-caused climate change.

"This is exactly what climate science told us would happen if the world continued burning coal, oil and gas," said Joyce Kimutai, a climate scientist from Imperial College London, on Wednesday.

"And it will continue getting hotter until we stop burning fossil fuels and reach net-zero emissions."

"The Earth has just experienced its warmest day," the monitor said in a statement on Tuesday, which saw July 21 hit a record.

C3S Director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement: "We are now in truly uncharted territory and as the climate keeps warming, we are bound to see records being broken in future months and years," he said.

Climate change is causing longer, stronger and more frequent extreme weather events like heat waves and floods, and this year has been marked by major disasters across the globe.

Deadly heat waves have already hit North America, Mexico, India and Thailand this year, to name a few, while flooding has devastated parts of East Africa and Brazil.

Scorching temperatures

Wildfires are torching a path across southern and Eastern Europe, as well as Canada and the United States as prolonged scorching temperatures in parts of the Northern Hemisphere make conditions much drier.

The burning of fossil fuels is the primary driver of global warming but emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases keep rising, despite international efforts to switch to clean energy and slow rising temperatures.

Last year was the hottest on record and 2024 could follow in step considering the "sufficiently warm" temperatures experienced to date, Copernicus said.

But it was "too early to predict with confidence" which would be hotter between the years, it added.

Agencies Via Xinhua