Earth sees third straight hottest day on record

Earth’s average temperature remained at a record high Wednesday 5 July after two days in which the planet reached unofficial records. It is the latest marker in a series of climate-change-driven extremes. The average global temperature was 62.9 degrees, according to the University of Maine’s climate reanalyzer, a tool that uses satellite data and computer simulations to measure the world’s condition. That matched a record set Tuesday and came after a previous record of 62.6 degrees was set Monday. “A record like this is another piece of evidence for the now massively supported proposition that global warming is pushing us into a hotter future”, said Stanford University climate scientist, Chris Field, who was not part of the calculations.

University of Maine climate scientist, Sean Birkle, creator of the climate reanalyzer, said the daily figures are unofficial but gave a useful snapshot of what’s happening in a warming world. While the figures are not an official government record, “this is showing us an indication of where we are right now,” said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief scientist, Sarah Kapnick. And NOAA indicated it will take the figures into consideration for its official record calculations.

Some parts of the world saw extraordinary heat waves. High-temperature records were surpassed this week in Quebec and Peru. Beijing reported nine straight days last week when the temperature exceeded 95 degrees and ordered a stop to all outdoor work Wednesday as high temperatures were forecast to pass 104 degrees. “I feel like we live in a tropical country right now”, city spokeswoman, Jill Sturdy, said. “It just kind of hits you. The air is so thick.”

“Temperatures have been unusual over the ocean and especially around the Antarctic this week because wind fronts over the Southern Ocean are strong, pushing warm air deeper south,” said Raghu Murtugudde, professor of atmospheric, oceanic and earth system science at the University of Maryland and visiting faculty at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Murtugudde said ocean heat is also going deeper. He said, “Oceans take up 93 per cent of the additional heat we are generating because of increasing greenhouse gases and they are now a huge reservoir of heat”.

Some places experienced unusually cold weather for the time of year, including southeast Australia and much of India. With many places seeing temperatures near 100.40 degrees, an average temperature record of 62.9 degrees might not seem very hot. But Tuesday’s global high was nearly 1.8 degrees higher than the 1979-2000 average, which already topped the nineteenth and twentieth and century averages.

In the US, heat advisories include portions of western Oregon, inland far Northern California, central New Mexico, Texas, Florida and the coastal Carolinas, according to the National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center. Excessive heat warnings are continuing across southern Arizona and California.