July 2019 may have been hottest month on record
ADVERTISEMENTAfter June 2019 was recognised by a number of official organisations as the hottest June on record, July may have now been the hottest month ever recorded.
That’s according to the Copernicus Centre for Climate Studies (C3S), which presented its data sets with the announcement that this July may have been marginally hotter than that of 2016, which was previously the hottest month on record.
The news comes during a summer of record-breaking temperatures across Europe:
- Paris beat its 1947 record of 40.4 ℃ when temperatures reached 42.6 ℃ in July
- Britain reached its second-highest temperature ever recorded, at 38.1 ℃ in the city of Cambridge
- The Netherlands saw temperatures peak at 40.4 ℃, topping 40 ℃ for the first time on record
- Germany recorded its highest ever temperature at 42.6 ℃ in Lingen in July
The warm weather also contributed to the massive loss of ice-sheets in Greenland, with much of the USA and Canada experiencing exceptional heat.
The C3S animation below illustrates how monthly global average temperatures has been increasing in all months of the year over the last four decades.
The Paris Agreement on limiting climate change aims to keep increases in global average temperatures to below 2 ℃ above pre-industrial levels and to aim to keep it below 1.5 ℃.
July 2019 was close to 1.2 ℃ above pre-industrial level, C3S said.
The Copernicus Centre for Climate Studies is part of the European Union’s Copernicus project, which is an Earth observation programme. C3S said other datasets from other organisations would become available in mid-August, which may show slightly different results.