NASA: July ‘Absolutely’ The Hottest Month In History

In July, the Earth reached its hottest temperature within the 136 years of climate record keeping, according to reports from NASA.

“July 2016 was absolutely the hottest month since the instrumental records began,” tweeted Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the institute that measures global temperature.

Schmidt said that there is a 99 percent chance that 2016 will be the hottest year ever recorded, notes the Chicago Tribune. As of now, 2014 and 2015 are the hottest years in recorded history.

“It’s a little alarming to me that we’re going through these records like nothing this year,” said the University of Oklahoma’s Professor Jason Furtado, who studies meteorology.

July is typically the hottest month of the year, and this one was 1.51 degrees higher than the long-term average, taken between 1951 and 1980. Some areas of the Arctic were more than seven degrees higher than the average.

“Each month just gives another data point that makes the evidence stronger that we’re changing the climate,” said climatology professor Simon Donner from the University of British Columbia.

July temperatures in the Middle East, if confirmed, hit the hottest temperatures ever recorded in the Eastern Hemisphere, with Mitribah, Kuwait, measuring a blistering 129.2 degrees.

According to Furtado, the record-breaking warmth correlates to extreme worldwide weather, including massive flooding in Maryland and China.

“The two are going hand-in-hand, and they’re giving us a picture of what a future world might look like,” said Furtado.

Temperatures soared after one of the strongest El Ninos ever recorded struck earlier this year, sending heat from the Pacific Ocean into the atmosphere. Though El Nino ended in the spring, temperatures are still breaking records.

“There’s been so much talk about El Nino this year, but this [warming] is not just El Nino,” said Donner. “The records set in 2016 have crushed the records set in previous El Ninos.”

If the extreme heat continues, areas of the Middle East and Africa could soon become uninhabitable, particularly in areas where electric supplies such as air conditioning and coolers are hard to come by, notes The Guardian.

“Those affected by threats of climate change are the people living at the edge of vulnerability and in the frontline of the perfect storm,” said Adel Abdellatif, a senior regional advisor on climate change with the UN.

Sources: Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, Gavin Schmidt/Twitter / Photo credit: Marion/Pixabay