The director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Gavin Schmidt has said that the month of July will likely be Earth’s hottest month in hundreds if not thousands of years, as a persistent heatwave baked swaths of the US south.
Schmidt made the announcement during a meeting at Nasa’s Washington headquarters that convened agency climate experts and other leaders, including Nasa administrator Bill Nelson and chief scientist and senior climate adviser Kate Calvin.
The meeting is coming during a summer that has put the climate crisis on full display.
Deadly floods are also reported to have struck New England. Canadian wildfire smoke has choked US cities. And tens of millions of people have been placed under heat advisories, with areas across the US south and west breaking temperature records.
“We are seeing unprecedented changes all over the world,” Schmidt was quoted as saying.
Though the changes may feel shocking, they are “not a surprise” to scientists, he added. “There has been a decade-on-decade increase in temperatures throughout the last four decades.”
According to reports, earth saw its hottest June on record, according to Nasa’s global temperature analysis, the agency announced last week.
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Schmidt said that all this heat is “certainly increasing the chances” that 2023 will be the hottest year on record. While his calculations show Earth has a 50% chance of setting that record this year, other models say there is as much as an 80% chance, he said.
Scientists also anticipate that 2024 will be even hotter than 2023, as an El Niño weather pattern – known for a tendency to boost global temperatures – will likely peak toward the end of this year.
Available reports show that the last major El Niño, from 2014 to 2016, led to each of those years successively breaking the global temperature record, and 2016 is currently the Earth’s hottest year ever recorded, Schmidt said.
At the meeting, experts raised the alarm about the changes Earth is experiencing and said they are directly linked to greenhouse gas emissions, though they stopped short of naming the source of the majority of those emissions: fossil fuels.
“What we know from science is that human activity and principally greenhouse gas emissions are unavoidably causing the warming that we’re seeing on our planet,” said Calvin. “This is impacting people and ecosystems around the world.”
The agency leaders also touted its many climate-focused initiatives, which they said can help governments better mitigate the climate crisis and also prepare for its effects.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
