Cape Town - July was the hottest month ever recorded globally.
While South Africans will remember shivering in winds blowing off snowy mountains, temperature statistics published by Nasa, by the Japan Meteorological Agency and the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the US show that the average global land and ocean temperature for July was the hottest for any month since record-keeping began in 1880.
NOAA said both the average temperature of the ocean and of the land were separately the hottest ever recorded in July.
Land temperature last month was 0.96ºC above the 20th-century average, while that of the sea was 0.75ºC above the average. The combined temperature of the land and sea was 0.81ºC above the 20th-century average.
And the first seven months of this year have also been an all-time planetary record high.
Nasa reports that in Africa, the average temperature for July was the second highest on record, the hottest being in 2002.
The agency reports “record warmth” for July across much of northern South America, parts of southern Europe and the western US.
This follows 2014 as being the hottest year on record.
The effects of global warming – caused mainly by our fossil fuel economy – are being measured in other ways, such as melting glaciers. NOAA said the average Arctic Sea ice extent in July last year was 9.5 percent below the 1981 to 2010 average.
Nasa reports that Greenland lost between 150 and 250km3 of ice per year between 2002 and 2006, while the Antarctic lost 152km3 between 2002 and 2005.
Increased carbon dioxide emissions have had other effects, such as increasing the acidity of the oceans.
Nasa reports that since the start of the Industrial Revolution, which marked the start of the sharp increase in carbon emissions resulting from human activity, the acidity of surface ocean waters has increased by about 30 percent, as the ocean absorbs increasing amounts of carbon from the air.
Nasa says the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by the upper layer of the world’s oceans is increasing by about 2 billion tons a year.
Sea levels rose about 17cm last century, but the rate in just the last decade was nearly double that.
Nasa says global warming is responsible for sea level rise in two ways: first because warmer air increases the rate of glacial melting and, second, because the ocean is absorbing most of the extra heat trapped by greenhouse gases and warmer seas take up more space than colder seas.
Cape Times