July Was World's Hottest Month On Record, NOAA Says. Others Say It Was Close

Seeing red again. Most of the world was warmer than normal
in July, 2019, says NOAA. The agency says the
month was the world's hottest on record.

Much of the world endured some pretty big heat waves during July and now the official word is in from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information: July was the world's hottest month on record.

In keeping with climate change, this is part of a trend. All of the hottest Julys on record happened in the past five years, and nine out of the 10 hottest happened since 2005, says NOAA. This July was 1.71 degrees warmer than the 20th century average.

July is normally the warmest month of the year for Earth, despite it being winter in the Southern Hemisphere. Given that this July was so warm globally, that made the seventh month of 2019 the hottest.

The places that seemed to be the hottest this July were Alaska, central Europe, sections of southern Asia and southern Africa and parts of eastern North America. (Here in Vermont, in eastern North America, Burlington had its third hottest July on record. A couple New England cities had their hottest July.)

The only cool spots, at least relative to average were in parts of northeastern Europe, a bit of northeastern Siberia and central Canada.

NOAA says so far in 2019, we're tied with 2017 as the second hottest year on record out of the past 140.

Global July temperatures since around 1880. Notice a trend?

Oh, and by the way, sea ice extent in the Arctic was at a record low level in July, 2019, as NOAA continued to share this bad climate news.

Different climatalogical and meteorological organizations measure global temperatures slightly differently.

The Category 6 blog notes:

"The Japan Meteorological Agency rated July 2019 in a tie with July, 2016 for warmest month on record and NASA found that July 2019 was in a virtual tie with August, 2016.

"Minor differences in rankings between NASA, NOAA and JMA can arise because of how they handle data-sparse regions such as the Arctic, where few surface weather stations exist."

El Nino patterns tend to make the world a bit warmer, on top of the underlying global warming. In July a weak El Nino was fading into oblivion. I'm not sure if the dead/dying El Nino will have a noticeable effect on global temperatures for the remainder of the year.