It is hot. Very hot. And we are only a few weeks into summer.
Texas and part of the south-west of the US are enduring a searing heatwave. At one point, more than 120 million Americans were under some form of heat advisory, the US National Weather Service said. That is more than one in three of the total population.
In the UK, the June heat didn’t just break all-time records, it smashed them. It was 0.9C hotter than the previous record, set back in 1940. That is a huge margin.
There is a similar story of unprecedented hot weather in North Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
No surprise, then, that the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather forecasts said that globally, June was the hottest on record.
And the heat has not eased. The three hottest days ever recorded were in the past week, according to the EU climate and weather service, Copernicus.
The average world temperature hit 16.89C on Monday 3 July and topped 17C for the first time on 4 July, with an average global temperature of 17.04C.
Provisional figures suggest that was exceeded on 5 July when temperatures reached 17.05C.
These highs are in line with what climate models predicted, says Prof Richard Betts, climate scientist at the Met Office and University of Exeter.
“We should not be at all surprised with the high global temperatures,” he says. “This is all a stark reminder of what we’ve known for a long time, and we will see ever more extremes until we stop building up more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
When we think about how hot it is, we tend to think about the air temperature, because that’s what we experience in our daily lives.
But most of the heat stored near the surface of the Earth is not in the atmosphere, but in the oceans. And we’ve been seeing some record ocean temperatures this spring and summer.
The North Atlantic, for example, is currently experiencing the highest surface water temperatures ever recorded.
That marine heatwave has been particularly pronounced around the coasts of the UK, where some areas have experienced temperatures as much as 5C above what you would normally expect for this time of year.
How warming oceans are driving the climate juggernaut (msn.com)