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Bloomberg
2 days ago
- Climate
- Bloomberg
Third-Hottest July Brings Little Relief From Global Warming
Last month was only the third-hottest July on record, but any respite from global warming is expected to be short-lived. The temperature in July was 1.25C (2.25F) above the pre-industrial average, making it only the fourth month in the past 25 that fell below a 1.5C gain, according to a report by Europe's Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Irish Independent
2 days ago
- Climate
- Irish Independent
Over 160 sq km burnt by French wildfires in three days, as temperatures set to exceed 30C again this weekend
The fire in France's Aude wine region claimed one life and quickly spread over more than 160 sq km over three days in hot and dry weather, forcing hundreds of residents to flee their homes. Local authorities said they need to remain vigilant throughout the weekend because temperatures are expected to rise above 30C during another heatwave. Meanwhile, fires prompted evacuations elsewhere in the Mediterranean region, with authorities ordering evacuations near the Greek capital and in northern Turkey, where officials also had to temporarily suspend maritime traffic through the Dardanelles due to the smoke. In France, Aude administrator Christian Pouget said 1,000 people had not yet been able to return to their homes after the fire swept through 15 communes in the Corbieres mountain region, destroying or damaging at least 36 homes. One person died at home and at least 21 others were injured, including 16 firefighters, according to local authorities. Some 1,300 homes were still without electricity yesterday morning after infrastructure was extensively damaged, the Aude prefecture said. Residents have been warned not to return home without authorisation, as many roads remain blocked and dangerous. Those forced to flee have been housed in emergency shelters across 17 municipalities. Many fled to the community of Tuchan when the fire started on Tuesday, its mayor Beatrice Bertrand said. 'We have received and hosted over 200 people. We gave them food, thanks to local businesses who opened their stores despite it being very late,' Ms Bertrand said. 'Civil Protection brought us beds. And also, the local villagers offered their homes to welcome them. It was their first night here and many were shocked and scared.' An investigation is under way to determine what sparked the fire. Authorities said the fire was the largest recorded since France's national fire database was created in 2006, but the minister for ecological transition, Agnes Pannier-Runacher, went further, calling the blaze the worst since 1949 and linking it to climate change. The Mediterranean basin has seen multiple large fires this summer. Scientists warn that climate change is exacerbating the frequency and intensity of heat and dryness, making the region more vulnerable to wildfires. Last month, a wildfire that reached the southern port of Marseille, France's second-largest city, injured around 300 people. Europe is the world's fastest-warming continent, with temperatures increasing at twice the speed of the global average since the 1980s, according to the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service. In Greece, a fast-moving wildfire yesterday forced a series of evacuations south-east of Athens, approaching residential areas as firefighters battled strong winds. The blaze advanced over scrub-covered hillsides in the Keratea region, spreading through an area with scattered homes 25 miles from the capital. The fire service said one man was found dead during evacuation. As the flames tore through clusters of homes, gas canisters used for cooking exploded, cars went up in flames and residents battled from porches to save their homes. Firefighting planes and helicopters swooped over the flames that sent thick black clouds of smokes toward coastal areas. Authorities deployed 190 firefighters, supported by volunteers, and police blocked traffic in the area to allow fire engines through. Strong winds disrupted ferry services at ports around Athens. A wildfire fuelled by strong winds in north-west Turkey prompted authorities to evacuate a university campus and an elderly care home, and to suspend some maritime traffic yesterday, reports said. The flow of ships through the Dardanelles Strait was temporarily halted due to heavy smoke and reduced visibility in the narrow waterway. The fire broke out at an agricultural field near Saricaeli village in Canakkale, before spreading rapidly into a nearby forested area. With the flames approaching dangerously close to the care home and a campus of Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University, both facilities were evacuated as a precaution, the Cumhuriyet newspaper and other media reported. Footage aired by Haberturk TV showed a fire engine being engulfed in flames, forcing firefighters to flee. Meanwhile, firefighters in a mountainous area north of Los Angeles have made good progress in their battle against a brush fire which has forced thousands of people to evacuate the area, an official said. The Canyon Fire ignited on Thursday afternoon and spread rapidly in the dry, steep terrain of Ventura and Los Angeles counties to more than 7.6 square miles, with no containment by 11pm, according to Ventura County Fire Department. At least 400 personnel battled the blaze, along with several planes and helicopters. No further growth was reported yesterday morning, though the fire remained uncontained, county fire department public information officer Andrew Dowd said.
The Star
3 days ago
- Climate
- The Star
Third-hottest July worldwide on record wreaks climate havoc
PARIS (AFP): The third-hottest July worldwide ended a string of record-breaking temperatures last month, but many regions were still devastated by extreme weather amplified by global warming, the European climate monitoring service said in a statement. Heavy rains flooded Pakistan and northern China; Canada, Scotland and Greece struggled to tame wildfires intensified by persistent drought; and many nations in Asia and Scandinavia recorded new average highs for the month. "Two years after the hottest July on record, the recent streak of global temperature records is over," Carlo Buontempo, director of the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service, said in a statement. "But that does not mean climate change has stopped," he said. "We continue to witness the effects of a warming world." - A misleading dip - As in June, July showed a slight dip compared to the preceding two years, averaging 1.25 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial (1850-1900) era. 2023 and 2024 warmed above that benchmark by more than 1.5C, which is the Paris Agreement target set in 2015 for capping the rise in global temperatures at relatively safe levels. That deceptively small increase has been enough to make storms, heatwaves and other extreme weather events far more deadly and destructive. "We continued to witness the effect of a warming world in events such as extreme heatwaves and catastrophic floods in July," Buontempo said. Last month, temperatures exceeded 50C in the Gulf, Iraq and -- for the first time -- Turkey, while torrential rains killed hundreds of people in China and Pakistan. In Spain, more than a thousand deaths were attributed by a public institute to the heat in July, half as many as in the same period in 2024. The main source of the CO2 driving up temperatures is well known: the burning of oil, coal and gas to generate energy. "Unless we rapidly stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, we should expect not only new temperature records but also a worsening of impacts," Buontempo said. - Regional contrasts - Global average temperatures are calculated using billions of satellite and weather readings, both on land and at sea, and the data used by Copernicus extends back to 1940. Even if July was milder in some places than in previous years, 11 countries experienced their hottest July in at least a half-century, including China, Japan, North Korea, Tajikistan, Bhutan, Brunei and Malaysia, according to AFP calculations. In Europe, Nordic countries saw an unprecedented string of hot days, including more than 20 days above 30C across Finland. More than half of Europe along with the Mediterranean region experienced the worst drought conditions in the first part of July since monitoring began in 2012, according to an AFP analysis of data from the European Drought Observatory (EDO). In contrast, temperatures were below normal in North and South America, India and parts of Australia and Africa, as weas in Antarctica. - Seas still overheating - Last month was also the third-hottest July on record for sea surface temperatures. Locally, however, several ocean records for July were broken: in the Norwegian Sea, in parts of the North Sea, in the North Atlantic west of France and Britain. The extent of Arctic sea ice was 10 percent below average, the second lowest for a July in 47 years of satellite observations, virtually tied with the readings of 2012 and 2021. Diminishing sea ice is a concern not because it adds to sea levels, but because it replaces the snow and ice that reflect almost all the Sun's energy back into space with deep blue ocean, which absorbs it. Ninety percent of the excess heat generated by global warming is absorbed by the oceans. In Antarctica, sea ice extent is the third lowest on record for this month. - AFP
Express Tribune
3 days ago
- Climate
- Express Tribune
Global warming wreaks havoc
Members of a search and rescue team look for victims trapped in a building following a landslide triggered by heavy rain in Dayuan village in China's Guangzhou city. Photo: AFP The third-hottest July worldwide ended a string of record-breaking temperatures, but many regions were devastated by extreme weather amplified by global warming, the European climate monitoring service said Thursday. Heavy rains flooded Pakistan and northern China; Canada, Scotland and Greece struggled to tame wildfires intensified by persistent drought; and many nations in Asia and Scandinavia recorded new average highs for the month. "Two years after the hottest July on record, the recent streak of global temperature records is over," Carlo Buontempo, director of the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service, said in a statement. "But that does not mean climate change has stopped," he said. "We continue to witness the effects of a warming world." As in June, July showed a slight dip compared to the preceding two years, averaging 1.25 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial (1850-1900) era. 2023 and 2024 warmed above that benchmark by more than 1.5C, which is the Paris Agreement target set in 2015 for capping the rise in global temperatures at relatively safe levels. That deceptively small increase has been enough to make storms, heatwaves and other extreme weather events far more deadly and destructive. "We continued to witness the effect of a warming world in events such as extreme heatwaves and catastrophic floods in July," Buontempo said. Last month, temperatures exceeded 50C in the Gulf, Iraq and — for the first time — Turkey, while torrential rains killed hundreds of people in China and Pakistan. In Spain, more than a thousand deaths were attributed by a public institute to the heat in July, half as many as in the same period in 2024. The main source of the CO2 driving up temperatures is well known: the burning of oil, coal and gas to generate energy. "Unless we rapidly stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, we should expect not only new temperature records but also a worsening of impacts," Buontempo said. Global average temperatures are calculated using billions of satellite and weather readings, both on land and at sea, and the data used by Copernicus extends back to 1940.
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Business Standard
3 days ago
- Science
- Business Standard
July cooler than last 2 yrs, but extreme weather impacts seen: Scientists
The world experienced its third-warmest July on record this year, the European Union agency that tracks global warming said Thursday, with temperatures easing slightly for the month as compared with the record high two years ago. Despite the slightly lower global average temperature, scientists said extreme heat and deadly flooding persisted in July. Two years after the hottest July on record, the recent streak of global temperature records is over for now. But this doesn't mean climate change has stopped, said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service. We continued to witness the effects of a warming world. The EU monitoring agency said new temperature records and more climate extremes are to be expected unless greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are brought down. On July 25, Turkey recorded its highest-ever temperature of 50.5 degrees Celsius as it battled wildfires. While not as hot as July 2023 or July 2024, the hottest and second-hottest on record, the Copernicus report said that the planet's average surface temperature last month was still 1.25 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period, before humans began the widespread burning of fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal. Greenhouse gases released from the burning of fossil fuels are the main driver of climate change. Deforestation, wildfires and many kinds of factories also release heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere. Despite a somewhat cooler July, the 12-month period between August 2024 and July 2025 was 1.53 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, exceeding the threshold set in 2015 to limit human-caused warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Globally, 2024 was the hottest year in recorded history. Europe is warming faster than any other continent, with temperatures increasing twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s, according to Copernicus. The planet last year temporarily surpassed the warming target set at the 2015 Paris climate pact. But that target, of limiting warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels, is defined as a 20-year average and the world has not yet breached that threshold. Copernicus is the European Union's earth observation system based on satellite and on-the-ground data collection. Britain rejoined the climate agency in 2023. Julien Nicolas, a senior Copernicus scientist, said it was important to view last month's decrease in the context of two anomalous years of warming. We are really coming out from a streak of global temperature records that lasted almost two years, Nicolas said. It was a very exceptional streak." He added that as long as the long-term warming trend persists, extreme weather events will continue to happen. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
