“Climatologically, July is the warmest month of the year,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a monthly report released Monday. “As the warmest July on record, July 2023, at least nominally, was the warmest month on record for the globe.”Temperature data through July make it virtually certain that 2023 will rank among the five warmest years on record, with a nearly 50% probability that it will be the single warmest year on record, the agency said. The month “was the warmest on record for land, warmest on record for oceans, and when you combine the two, it was the warmest on record for the combined land and ocean anomaly values,” Gleason said. At 1.78 degrees above normal, the month saw the highest monthly sea surface temperature anomaly of any month in NOAA’s climate record. “If you have to summarize it in two words, it’s global warming — that is by far the dominant effect,” Swain said.

Source: Los Angeles Times August 15, 2023 16:10 UTC