WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - July has equaled, if not surpassed as the hottest month in recorded history, the UN weather agency said in its latest data, prompting the United Nations chief to call it 'a climate emergency.'
'Based on the first 29 days of the month, July 2019 will be on par with, and possibly marginally warmer than the previous warmest July, in 2016, which was also the warmest month ever,' data from the World Meteorological Organization and Copernicus Climate Change Program show.
June 2019 was recorded as the hottest June in history.
Announcing the data in New York, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the period from 2015 to 2019 is going to be the five hottest years on record.
'This year alone, we have seen temperature records shattered from New Delhi to Anchorage, from Paris to Santiago, from Adelaide and to the Arctic Circle. If we do not take action on climate change now, these extreme weather events are just the tip of the iceberg. And, indeed, the iceberg is also rapidly melting,' he told reporters.
'Beautiful speeches are not enough; leaders need to come to New York on September 23 with concrete plans to reach these goals', he added, referring to the UN Climate Action Summit.
WMO will submit to the Summit a five year report (2015-2019) on the state of the world's climate.
Europe has been reeling under scorching heat in recent weeks, with a string of countries logging record high temperatures that have caused disruption to transport and infrastructure and stress on people's health and the environment. As the heat dome spread to Greenland, it accelerated the rate of ice melt.
National temperature records of Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom were broken on July 25, while it marked the hottest day in Paris, with a temperature of 42.6 °C. Thousands of hectares were burned by wildfires in northern France, a very unusual phenomenon in the region.
Unprecedented wildfires raged in the Arctic for the second consecutive month, devastating forests which used to absorb carbon dioxide and instead turning them intosources of greenhouse gases.
WMO expects that 2019 will be in the five top warmest years on record.
The Russian Federal Forestry Agency estimates that a spate of wildfires that have been raging in Siberia these days have burned 33,200 square kilometers. 745 active fires are causing massive ecological devastation and impacting air quality for hundreds of kilometers. The smoke can be clearly seen from space.
'By burning vegetation, the fires also reduce the capacity of the biosphere to absorb carbon dioxide,' said Oksana Tarasova, Chief of WMO's Atmosphere and Environment Research Division.
'Every heatwave occurring in Europe today carry the signature of man-made climate change,' a study says.
Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
© 2019 AFX News
