Hottest temperature ever recorded

 From a toot by earthlyeducation

Sorry I would to retract my previous statement that Sunday July 21 was the hottest day on record. Monday July 22 is now the hottest ever day in recorded history. 

The preliminary global surface temperature for July 22 just came in at 17.15°C (62.87F), obliterating the previous record set just the day before of 17.09C.

The Copernicus data go back to 1940.

Even if we all panic, and move really fast to cut emissions, it will still take +- 10 years to make global electricity generation even 80% renewable and to make the car/light-truck fleet 100% electric.  But you can still do something right now, something which would cut emissions by 30%:  become vegetarian.  That won't take 10 years to take effect.  It'll be immediate.

Summer of 2023 hottest ever recorded

From The Guardian  (Of course, they're referring to the Northern Hemisphere summer--the Southern Hemisphere summer, which begins in November, will likely also be much hotter than normal.)

The summer of 2023 was the hottest ever recorded, as the climate crisis and emerging El Niño pushed up temperatures and drove extreme weather across the world.

In June, July and August – the northern hemisphere summer – the global average temperature reached 16.77C, which was 0.66C above the 1991 to 2020 average. The new high is 0.29C above the previous record set in 2019, a big jump in climate terms.

The data, from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), showed that August was about 1.5C warmer than the preindustrial average for 1850 to 1900, although the goal of the world’s nations to keep global heating below 1.5C will be considered broken only when this temperature is sustained over months and years.

Heatwaves, fires and floods have destroyed lives and livelihoods across the globe, from North and South America, to Europe, India, Japan and China.

“Our planet has just endured a season of simmering – the hottest summer on record. Climate breakdown has begun,” said the UN secretary general, António Guterres. “Scientists have long warned what our fossil fuel addiction will unleash. Our climate is imploding faster than we can cope with, with extreme weather events hitting every corner of the planet.”

The oceans have been especially hot in recent months. The C3S data showed that for every day in August, global average sea surface temperatures beat the previous record set in March 2016, which was also an El Niño year. North Atlantic Ocean temperatures reached a new record of 25.19C on 31 August. Antarctic sea ice extent has also been extremely low for the time of year.

Samantha Burgess, at C3S, said: “Global temperature records continue to tumble in 2023, with the warmest August following on from the warmest July and June, leading to the warmest boreal summer in our data record going back to 1940.” The findings are based on computer analysis of billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations around the world.

Dr Friederike Otto, at Imperial College London, said: “Breaking heat records has become the norm in 2023. Global warming continues because we have not stopped burning fossil fuels. It is that simple.skip past newsletter promotion

“Studies by World Weather Attribution have shown that climate change has dramatically intensified some of the most devastating weather disasters in the summer of 2023. The hot, dry and windy conditions that fuelled the wildfires in Quebec Canada were made at least twice as likely because of climate change. The extreme heatwaves that impacted Europe and North America were made 2.0-2.5C hotter because of climate change.”

The human-caused climate crisis was undeniably to blame for the deadly heatwaves that struck Europe and the US in July. Both would have been virtually impossible without the global heating driven by burning fossil fuels, scientists found.

In August, the Guardian interviewed 45 of the world’s leading climate scientists, who said that the increased heating seen in 2023 was completely in line with the predictions they had been making for decades. They said the effects were more severe than expected due to communities being more vulnerable than anticipated, making efforts to protect people more urgent than ever.

Tuesday was the world's hottest day on record

From The Guardian

World temperature records have been broken for a second day in a row, data suggest, as experts issued a warning that this year’s warmest days are still to come – and with them the warmest days ever recorded.

The average global air temperature was 17.18C (62.9F) on Tuesday, according to data collated by the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), surpassing the record 17.01C reached on Monday.

Until the start of this week, the hottest day on record was in 2016, during the last El Niño global weather event, when the global average temperature reached 16.92C.

On Tuesday, the World Meteorological Organization, the UN’s weather body, confirmed El Niño had returned. Experts predicted that, combined with the increased heat from anthropogenic global heating, it would lead to more record-breaking temperatures.

“El Niño hasn’t peaked yet and summer is still in full swing in the northern hemisphere, so it wouldn’t be surprising if the record were broken again in coming days or weeks,” said Dr Paulo Ceppi, a lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London.

Dr Karsten Haustein, a research fellow in atmospheric radiation at Leipzig University, said: “The coming days will probably see a small downturn, but since the annual global temperature maximum is at the end of July, more days are likely to be warmer than yesterday (given that El Niño is now pretty much in full swing) …

“Chances are that the month of July will be the warmest ever, and with it the hottest month ever … ‘ever’ meaning since the Eemian, which is indeed some 120,000 years ago.”

The record-breaking mean temperature was reported by the Climate Reanalyzer service hosted by the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute. It uses data from the NCEP’s climate forecast system to provide a time series of daily mean two-metre air temperature, based on readings from surface, air balloon and satellite observations. The Guardian contacted the Climate Change Institute for comment.

Various parts of the world have been experiencing heatwaves. The Met Office said on Monday that the UK had had its hottest ever June. The southern US has been sweltering under an intense heat dome in recent weeks, including on the national 4 July holiday on Tuesday. In parts of China, an enduring heatwave continued, with temperatures above 35C.

North Africa has experienced temperatures near 50C, and in the Middle East thousands have been enduring unusually scorching heat as they make the hajj religious pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia.

Even Antarctica, where it is currently winter, has registered anomalously high temperatures. Ukraine’s Vernadsky research base, in the vast frozen continent’s Argentine Islands, recently broke its July temperature record with a reading of 8.7C.

“The temperatures creating these record-breaking days match exactly expectations under human-caused climate change,” said Ilan Kelman, a professor of disasters and health at University College London’s Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction.

“As the rising temperatures drive worsening heatwaves, including terrible humidity, we expect to see substantial increases in related deaths. Many people cannot afford indoor cooling and some people must be outside for work. Heat-humidity then becomes the silent killer, since we often do not realise how many people are in lethal difficulty, especially when it does not cool down at night.”

Yet we still do too little to slash emissions.

2022 was Scotland and the UK's hottest year

From the BBC

The Met Office has confirmed that 2022 was Scotland's hottest year on record.

The average temperature was 8.5C, beating the previous record of 8.43C in 2014.

Across the UK, the average annual temperature last year passed 10C for the first time at 10.03C - topping the previous high of 9.88C in 2014.

A study by Met Office scientists has concluded that human-induced climate change has made record annual temperatures 160 times more likely.

All four nations set records for heat in 2022, with England seeing the highest average temperature at 10.94C, followed by Wales (10.23C), Northern Ireland (9.85C) and then Scotland (8.50C).

The year also saw Scotland set its highest ever daily temperature, when it hit 34.8C (94.6F) at Charterhall in the Borders on 19 July.

Dr Mark McCarthy, head of the Met Office National Climate Information Centre, said: "Although an arbitrary number, the UK surpassing an annual average temperature of 10C is a notable moment in our climatological history.

"This moment comes as no surprise, since 1884 all the 10 years recording the highest annual temperature have occurred from 2003.

"It is clear from the observational record that human-induced global warming is already impacting the UK's climate."

The latest data shows that 15 of the UK's top 20 warmest years on record have all occurred this century - with the entire top 10 within the past two decades.

The Met Office said that a UK mean temperature of 10C would have been expected once in 500 years in a natural climate - before humans started producing the emissions that are responsible for climate change through activities such as burning fossil fuels.

But it said this was now likely to occur every three to four years.

[Read more here]

Record heat in October

 From Berkeley Earth

Year-to-date, 7.8% of the Earth’s surface has experienced record warmth. No part of the Earth’s surface has been record cold in its year-to-date average.