Third-hottest July on record wreaks climate havoc

BRUSSELS

The third-hottest July worldwide ended a string of record-breaking temperatures last month, but many regions were still devastated by extreme weather amplified by global warming, the European climate monitoring service said Thursday.

Heavy rains flooded Pakistan and northern China; Canada, Scotland and Greece struggled to tame wildfires intensified by persistent drought and many nations in Asia and Scandinavia recorded new average highs for the month.

"Two years after the hottest July on record, the recent streak of global temperature records is over," Carlo Buontempo, director of the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service, said in a statement.

"But that does not mean climate change has stopped," he said. "We continue to witness the effects of a warming world."

As in June, July showed a slight dip compared to the preceding two years, averaging 1.25 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial (1850-1900) era.

2023 and 2024 warmed above that benchmark by more than 1.5C, which is the Paris Agreement target set in 2015 for capping the rise in global temperatures at relatively safe levels.

That deceptively small increase has been enough to make storms, heat waves and other extreme weather events far more deadly and destructive.

Last month, temperatures exceeded 50C in the Gulf, Iraq and, for the first time, Türkiye, while torrential rains killed hundreds of people in China and Pakistan.

The main source of the CO2 driving up temperatures is well known: The burning of oil, coal and gas to generate energy.

"Unless we rapidly stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, we should expect not only new temperature records but also a worsening of impacts," Buontempo said.