There’s nothing wrong with you or your sweat glands, it’s just that July 1 to July 31 this year turned out to be the absolute hottest month on record.
A combination of land and water surface temperatures, the average global temperature in July was 61.86 degrees Fahrenheit.
Similarly, every month this year has ranked among the top four warmest in NASA’s analysis, including back-to-back warmest months on record in June and July. The average temperature for July was 71.7 degrees, 1.9 degrees below normal.
Large parts of the Earth were much warmer than average, including Africa which saw its second hottest July on record.
According to Jake Crouch, Climate Scientist with NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), who spoke to reporters during Thursday’s NOAA briefing, this latest record very likely will make 2015 the hottest year on record, beating out 2014 for top spot on the list.
Record-high temperatures in 2015 would provide further evidence for a long-term warming trend – a fact now disputed by a vocal group of climate skeptics.
“The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for July 2015 was the highest for July in the 136-year period of record”, NOAA reported.
This year, the world’s oceans were the warmest they have ever been in July. Earth has been in its warmest since at least 4,000 years, suggests 150 years of data to look at, tree rings, ice cores and coral formations.
It wasn’t all in your head – last month was hotter than ever before.
“We’ve recently seen record temperatures in the ocean, a record increase in sea levels and record glacial melting worldwide”, Blunden said, adding that extreme weather phenomena such as “droughts, heat waves and flooding” are increasingly severe. “What does that mean for people on the ground?” he told reporters.
NOAA also predicts that a strong El Nino is building up whose effect will be more than the intensity of the 1997 climate event which affected the weather drastically across the globe; from fires in Australia to mudslides in California.