This past Tuesday — the fourth day in the month of July in the year called 2023 in the common era — was the single hottest day on record, according to data from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Maine's Climate Change Institute. The average global air temperature reached 62.92 degrees Fahrenheit (17.18 degrees Celsius) as measured from two meters above the surface of the Earth.
This breaks the previous known record for the hottest average global air temperature, which was established … one day earlier, on the third day of July in the year called 2023 in the common era, when the air reached 62.62 degrees Fahrenheit, or 17.01 degrees Celsius. The previous hottest day on record was set in July 2022, which matched an earlier record set in August 2016.
If the comparative air temperature is hard to wrap your head around, consider that it's currently winter in Antarctica, and the temperature there reached nearly 50 degrees Fahrenheit. In winter. In Antarctica.
As Gizmodo notes:
A reading in the low 60s F might not sound too sweaty, but keep in mind that includes nighttime temperatures, Arctic and Antarctic readings, ocean surface temperature, and also it is winter in the southern hemisphere. For the Earth, overall, 17.01° C is hot. On Monday, it was the hottest that official monitoring had captured since satellite record-keeping began nearly 50 years ago. Likely it was the hottest day for our planet in a lot longer than that (possibly the hottest day since the last interglacial period 125,000 years ago—if you include data from sources like tree rings and ice cores).
[…]
Earth's recent surface temperatures are alarming. Early data indicates that the entire month of Junewas the hottest ever recorded, by a wide margin. 2023 is well on its way to beating the hottest year on record.
In other news, climate change is real.
Record for hottest day ever recorded on Earth broken twice in a row [Madeleine Cuff / New Scientist]
No Human Has Ever Seen it Hotter [Bill McKibben / The Crucial Years]
