Scientists already calculate July is the warmest month on record

WASHINGTON (AP) — July has been so hot thus far that scientists calculate that this month will be the hottest globally on record and likely the warmest human civilization has seen, even though there are several days left to sweat through.

The World Meteorological Organization and the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service on Thursday proclaimed July's heat is beyond record-smashing.

They said Earth's temperature has been temporarily passing over a key warming threshold: the internationally accepted goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

Temperatures were 1.5 degrees warmer than pre-industrial times for a record 16 days this month, but the Paris climate accord aims to keep the 20- or 30-year global temperature average to 1.5 degrees. A few days of temporarily beating that threshold have happened before, but never in July.

July has been so off-the-charts hot with heat waves blistering three continents – North America, Europe and Asia – that researchers said a record was inevitable.

The US Southwest's all-month heat wave is showing no signs of stopping as the heat wave at the end of the week pushed into most of the Midwest and East with more than 128 million Americans under some kind of heat advisory Thursday.

"Unless an ice age were to appear all of sudden out of nothing, it is basically virtually certain we will break the record for the warmest July on record and the warmest month on record," Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo told The Associated Press.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres pointed to the calculations and urged world leaders to do more to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases.

"Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning," Guterres told reporters in a New York briefing. "The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived."

Buontempo and other scientists said the records are from human-caused climate change augmented by a natural El Nino warming of parts of the central Pacific that changes weather worldwide.

Usually records aren't calculated until a week or longer after a month's end. 

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