July 2023 set to to be the hottest month ever recorded, climate scientists say

"The age of global warming is over, it's time for the age of global boiling," warns the United Nations Secretary General.

Transcript

00:00 July 2023 is set to be a record breaker as the hottest month on record, possibly the

00:06 warmest in human history. A few of the highs that have been set this month, we had 52.9

00:13 degrees Celsius in China, 48.2 degrees Celsius in Sardinia, 39.6 degrees at night in Algeria

00:22 and sea temperatures of 37.2 degrees in Florida. Now, we have been building up to this for

00:29 some time. If we have a look at this graphic, then the black line shows daily global surface

00:35 temperatures this year since January, and it's above average all year, building up to

00:40 the peaks that you see there in July. Now, this new all time record is actually the culmination

00:46 of the heat waves we've seen on land and also in the oceans. Here's Samantha Burgess from

00:51 the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

00:53 So all of this additional warm air and warm surface water is kind of feeding back on each

01:01 other. So we're seeing record temperatures warmer than we've ever seen before.

01:06 You may have heard that 2023 will be warmer because the El Nino phenomenon is back in

01:12 the Pacific, part of a natural cycle on our planet. But scientists say it's actually too

01:18 early for that.

01:19 It's not El Nino yet. So the expectation is that with El Nino developing right now,

01:26 we will get warmer temperatures to come. And the expectation is that the temperatures for

01:31 2024 may be even warmer still.

01:34 Indeed, the seasonal forecast for the rest of the year does show continued above average

01:40 temperatures over land. So what can we do? Well, world leaders will have to act quickly

01:45 at the G20 and COP28 summits in order to slash emissions of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere

01:53 as soon as possible. Doing so will slow down the rate of warming, but there's no instant

02:00 remedy. The heat and the weather extremes that we have been experiencing are with us

02:05 for decades to come.

02:06 [SWOOSH]