Thursday July 25, 2024
Grist —
Sunday was an unprecedented day, and not just because President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race so close to the election. July 21 was the hottest day on record, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, with a global average temperature of 62.76 degrees Fahrenheit, slightly beating out the previous record set on July 6 of last year.
For 13 straight months now, the planet has been notching record temperatures, from hottest year (2023) to hottest month (last July). And what was a daily temperature record eight years ago has now become worryingly commonplace. “What is truly staggering is how large the difference is between the temperature of the last 13 months and the previous temperature records,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the European Union’s Copernicus service, in a statement. “We are now in truly uncharted territory and as the climate keeps warming, we are bound to see new records being broken in future months and years.”
The territory may be uncharted, but the causes of this heat are abundantly clear. For one, there’s the steady rise of global temperatures due to carbon emissions. Since 1850, the Earth’s temperature has risen by 0.11 degrees F per decade on average, but that rate of warming since 1982 has jumped to 0.36 degrees per decade. Last year was already the hottest year on record by far, while 10 of the warmest years have all happened in the last decade. Copernicus also notes that before July 2023, the daily global average temperature record was 62.24 degrees F, on August 13, 2016. But since July 3, 2023, 57 days have exceeded that mark. Uncharted territory, indeed.