“Preventing irreversible climate disruption is the race of our lives and for our lives,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in an address announcing the new record on Thursday, as the World Meteorological Organization and Copernicus Climate Change Programme revealed the hellacious milestone. “It is a race we can—and must—win.”
Provisional data from the Copernicus Climate Change Program shows that July 2019 will be about 2.16 degrees Fahrenheit (1.2 Celsius) more than preindustrial levels. The final report will be released on Monday.
“We have always lived through hot summers. But this is not the summer of our youth. This is not your grandfather’s summer,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres, announcing the data in New York.
Guterres told reporters that “this is even more significant because the previous hottest month, July 2016, occurred during one of the strongest El Niño’s ever,” which was not the case this year, according to CBC Canada.
An El Niño is a natural warming of the Pacific Ocean that once it interacts with the atmosphere often warms up the globe and changes rainfall and temperature patterns. This makes the latest figures particularly significant because July 2016 was during one of the strongest occurrences of the El Niño phenomenon. Unlike 2016, 2019 has not been marked by a strong El Niño.
A race for our lives
It is unusual for a world organization to release preliminary data, however, Jonathan Fowler, a spokesperson for the WMO, told Earther that “given the importance of global engagement around the challenges posed by climate change and its impacts, there was an appetite to release figures at the highest international level as soon as the month ended.”
We have five months left in this year, but it is pretty much a given that 2019 will go down as one of the five warmest years in recorded history. Guterres said that temperature-shattering records from New Delhi and Anchorage to Paris, Santiago, Adelaide, Australia, and the Arctic Circle, means the world is on track for the period from 2015 to 2019 “to be the five hottest years on record.”
.WMO data shows July at least equaled if not surpassed the hottest month in recorded history.
“Preventing irreversible climate disruption is the race of our lives and for our lives. It is a race we can and must win”, antonioguterres says . ClimateActionNow ClimateEmergency lZVTeZV8vp— UN Spokesperson (@UN_Spokesperson) August 1, 2019
The UN chief also warns that unless all nations take immediate action to tackle climate change, extreme weather events happening now “are just the tip of the iceberg.” Guterres added, “And the iceberg is also rapidly melting.”
“Preventing irreversible climate disruption is the race of our lives and for our lives,” Guterres said. “It is a race we can — and must — win.”
