2025 Had Earth's Third-Hottest July On Earth: Scientists
Last month was Earth's third warmest July since records began and included a record national temperature in Turkey of 50.5 degrees Celsius (122.9 Fahrenheit), scientists said on Thursday.
Last month continued a trend of extreme climate conditions that scientists attribute to man-made global warming, even though there was a pause in record-breaking temperatures for the planet.
According to the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), the average global surface air temperature reached 16.68 C in July, which is 0.45 C above the 1991-2020 average for the month.
"Two years after the hottest July on record, the recent streak of global temperature records is over – for now," said Carlo Buontempo, director of C3S.
"But this doesn't mean climate change has stopped. We continued to witness the effects of a warming world in events such as extreme heat and catastrophic floods in July."
While not as hot as the record-setting July 2023 and second-warmest July 2024, Earth's average surface temperature last month was still 1.25 C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period, when humans began burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale.
Moreover, the 12-month period from August 2024 to July 2025 was 1.53 C warmer than pre-industrial levels, exceeding the 1.5 C threshold that was set as a maximum in the Paris Agreement that sought to curb global warming and entered into force in 2016.
The main cause of climate change is the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels.
Last year was the world's hottest year ever recorded.
The world has not yet officially surpassed the 1.5 C target, which refers to a long-term global average temperature over several decades.
However, some scientists argue that staying below this threshold is no longer realistically achievable. They are urging governments to accelerate cuts to CO2 emissions to reduce the extent of the overshoot and curb the rise in extreme weather events.
The C3S has temperature records dating back to 1940, which are cross-referenced with global data reaching as far back as 1850.
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Business Standard
15 hours ago
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Brain-eating amoeba in Kerala: How it spreads, early signs and prevention
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News18
17 hours ago
- News18
Planting trees in tropics may provide strongest returns in cooling planet: Study
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Mint
2 days ago
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Climate havoc: Jellyfish are getting in the way of electricity supply
Next Story David Fickling Heat has begun to impact power infrastructure in unforeseen ways. In France, two nuclear plants had to be shut down as jellyfish clogged parts of their cooling systems. Other plants face other problems. Can solar panels and lithium batteries ride to the rescue? A swarm of jellyfish caused two nuclear plants in France to shut down. Gift this article It's not just people who struggle to perform effectively when temperatures soar. The electricity system we depend on to keep us cool has the same problem. A swarm of jellyfish linked to unusually warm waters in northern Europe caused French utility Electricite de France to shut two nuclear power stations this week after these invertebrates clogged up parts of their cooling systems. It's not just people who struggle to perform effectively when temperatures soar. The electricity system we depend on to keep us cool has the same problem. A swarm of jellyfish linked to unusually warm waters in northern Europe caused French utility Electricite de France to shut two nuclear power stations this week after these invertebrates clogged up parts of their cooling systems. Other reactors in the country may have to cut output because temperatures in the Rhône and Garonne rivers are too high. In Iraq, supply to most of the country went down last week as millions of pilgrims descended on the city of Karbala for the Arba'in festival, spiking grid demand for fans and air-conditioners as the mercury rose above 40° Celsius. Even back-up equipment struggles in such conditions: electricity went out and play was suspended at the Cincinnati Open tennis tournament last week after an on-site generator apparently overheated. Power that goes out when we most need it should infuriate but not surprise us. Most of our infrastructure is designed to perform within specific temperature ranges that the global climate is leaving behind. More and more of it is likely to start breaking as heatwaves become more intense and widespread. That's particularly the case with thermal generators, which use the heat of burning fuels or atomic decay to spin turbines and create electricity. Such plants need to dump excess heat, but this gets harder as the air and water outside warm up. The result is decreasing efficiency and overheating, forcing plants to burn more fuel for the same output or halt operations. The probability that a coal generator will have a forced outage goes up by 3.2 percentage points during heatwaves, while gas and nuclear are respectively 1.3 and 1 percentage points more likely to suffer an unplanned failure, according to a recent study by researchers in Sweden and Italy. Separately, Iraqi researchers found that a gas plant lost about 21% of its generation potential as the temperature rose from 25° to 50° Celsius. Drought, which commonly occurs alongside heatwaves, makes the problem worse. Most thermal generators cool themselves by heating up water, whether it's in the sea, rivers or cooling towers. Cool water, like cool air, gets less abundant as the temperature rises. India has lost 19 days' worth of coal electricity since 2014 because water shortages have forced shutdowns, Reuters reported recently. In many areas, residents depend on tanker trucks and ever-deeper boreholes because generators are using up all of the surface water. Power stations may put more pressure on supplies of water between now and 2050 than the drinking water needs of its population, according to government forecasts. Conventional generators aren't the only ones to suffer. As anyone who's sat through a still and humid summer day would recognize, wind speeds often plummet in hot weather. Since the early 1980s, the area of the globe affected by such conditions has increased by 6.3% every decade—to the point that about 60% of the planet is now at risk. In Australia, Siberia and Europe, the availability of wind can now decline by 30% to 50% during heatwaves relative to what it would be in normal years—though a few areas, such as the northern US, east Africa, the Amazon and western China experience the opposite effect. Even if we can solve the problem of generating energy, getting it to consumers presents challenges. Transmission cables and transformers heat up as electrons travel through their wires and rising air temperatures make such components more susceptible to failure—especially as they're typically working harder on such days due to all the air-conditioners and fans running. It's not just people who need relief from the heat. About a third of electricity consumption from data centres comes from heating and cooling to maintain stable temperatures on-site. That demand rises along with the mercury and is becoming more pressing with the spread of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies. A heatwave in 2022 caused chaos at two London hospitals when their server racks shut down, scrambling the IT systems they depend on to process medical data. The rising dominance of solar panels and lithium-ion batteries, which tend to be more resilient than thermal generators and wind during heatwaves, will offer some respite. It still may not be enough. Most of our industrial civilization, built from the energy riches unleashed by coal, oil and gas, depends on a moderate climate that their carbon emissions are throwing into disorder. The damage caused by fossil technology is going to be with us long after we have switched to cleaner ways of generating power. ©Bloomberg The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy. Topics You May Be Interested In Catch all the Business News, Market News, Breaking News Events and Latest News Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates.
