Warming world sets new heat record

THE EARTH registered a new record heat in June and broke temperature markings for both the month and for the first half of the year.

The record heat “is becoming a monthly thing,” said Jessica Blunden, a climatologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
June was the fourth month of 2015 to set a record, she said. “There is almost no possibility that 2015 will not be the hottest on record”, she added.
NOAA estimates that the average world temperature in June was 16.33 degrees Celsius (61.48 Fahrenheit), which broke the previous high mark set last year by 12 hundredths of a degree Celsius (22/100 Fahrenheit).
Normally, temperature records are broken by one or two hundredths of degree, not for nearly a quarter of a degree, Blunden said. And the picture is even more dramatic if we take into account that we are just at midyear.
The first six months of 2015 were one sixth part of a degree warmer than the previous number, established in 2010 with an average of 14.35 degrees Celsius (57.83 F).
That was the last year that the El Niño phenomenon, a warming of the central Pacific Ocean that causes climate changes worldwide, occurred. But in 2010, El Niño disappeared. This year, forecasters predict that it (El Niño) will be stronger, not weaker. “If that happens, it is just going to be much higher than usual”, Blunden said. June was hot almost everywhere in the world, with exceptional heat in Spain, Austria, parts of Asia, Australia and South America.
Southern Pakistan suffered a heat wave that killed more than one thousand and two hundred people, which, according to an international data bank, would be the eighth most deadly in the world since 1900. In May a heat wave in India caused more than 2 thousand deaths, and it was placed as the fifth deadliest recorded.
The months of May and March 2015 also broke monthly heat records, which have been recorded for 136 years.
Originally, the NOAA estimated that February 2015 was only the second warmest February recorded, but new information emerged that made it the hottest, Blunden said.
The Earth has broken heat monthly records 25 times since 2000, but has not broken one cold monthly record since 1916. “This is how anthropogenic global warming looks: simply hotter and hotter”, said Jonathan Overpeck, co-director at the Environment Institute of the University of Arizona.