July will probably be the hottest month in “hundreds, if not thousands of years”warned this Thursday the renowned climatologist of the POT Gavin Schmidt during a briefing with journalists. With record temperatures in Latin America, Europe and Asia, the alert is worldwide.
This month already broke several daily temperature recordsaccording to the monitoring tools of the European Union and of the University of Mainein USAwhich combine terrain and satellite data in models to generate preliminary estimates.
Although they differ slightly from each otherthe trend of extreme heat is undeniable and it will probably be reflected in the more complete monthly reports that the US agencies will publish later, Schmidt said in the meeting with the press.
“We are observing unprecedented changes all over the world: the heat waves what are we seeing in United States, Europe and China are breaking records left and right“, he added.
It’s more, these effects cannot be attributed solely to the weather pattern of the El Niño phenomenona recurring weather event linked to the warming of the equatorial Pacific Ocean, which “really just showed up,” the climatologist continued.
Concern about the consequences of climate change
Although El Niño plays a small role, the scientist explained: “What we are seeing is a general warmingalmost everywhere especially in the oceans. We have been registering for many months record sea surface temperatures even outside the tropics.
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“We expect this to continue, and the reason we think it will is because we continue to put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,” he warned.
Alert for extreme heat in the world
What is currently happening is increasing the chances that 2023 will also be the hottest year on recordto which Schmidt currently assigns a “50-50 probability”, although he clarified that other scientists put it at 80%.
“But we anticipate that 2024 will be an even warmer year, because we are going to start with that El Niño event that is forming now, and that will peak towards the end of this year,” he said.
Schmidt’s warnings come at a time when the world was seen shaken by fires and serious health alerts in the last week, in addition to new temperature records.
Source: Ambito
