July 22 sets new record for hottest day globally: EU climate monitor

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

Preliminary data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) showed the daily global average temperature was 17.15 degrees Celsius (62.9 degrees Fahrenheit) on Monday, the warmest day in records going back to 1940.

This was 0.06C 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.”

Every month since June 2023 has eclipsed its own temperature record compared to the same month in previous years, an unprecedented 13-month streak C3S director Carlo Buontempo on Tuesday called “truly staggering”.

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