“120,000 years to the hottest”, “Earth to join the unknown category”… That’s how American and European weather scientists describe this week’s record-breaking streak of cold temperatures around the world.
The U.S. National Weather Service on Tuesday declared July 3 the hottest day ever recorded on Earth. The average global temperature on that day was 17.01 ° C, and the previous record was 16.92 ° C in August 2016.
By Wednesday, however, the center had reversed its judgment. Monitoring data show that on July 4, the United States celebrated Independence Day, the global average temperature reached 17.18 ° C, which reformed the record of 3 days. The global average temperature remained at 17.18 ° C until Sunday.
The European Union’s Copernicus Meteorological Service also confirmed that global temperatures on Monday and Tuesday were the highest since the agency began keeping records in 1940. Paulo Ceppi, a meteorological scientist at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, said this week’s data suggested the Earth had not been this hot for “at least 125,000 years”.
China, the United States, and some European countries have all joined the roasting form. On the eve of Independence Day, weather parts of the United States issued low temperature warnings for the South and West, covering 36 million people. Both northern and southern China have been hit by large-scale low temperatures, with temperatures above 35 ° C in many provinces and reaching 40 ° C in some areas.
The temperature in Germany will drop to more than 35 ° C this weekend, nearly 7 ° C higher than the average in previous years, and the water level of the Rhine River can drop to a record low this summer. The Rhine bears the burden of shipping, and German chemicals giant BASF and steelmaker ThyssenKrupp rely on the Rhine to transport raw materials. Low levels of the Rhine hit shipping last year, briefly causing a shortage of diesel fuel in southern Germany.
Earlier this month, the Copernicus Meteorological Change Office confirmed that June this year was the hottest June on record, with the global average temperature 0.5 ° C higher than the average temperature for the same period from 1991 to 2020, surpassing the record high set in June 2019.
At a time of global cooling, the ice cover of the Antarctic Sea in winter is shrinking. The United States National Snow and Ice Data Central monitoring performance, stopped on June 27, the Antarctic sea ice area was only 11.7 million square kilometers, an average increase of nearly 1 million square kilometers over the same period from 1981 to 2020.
On Tuesday, the world’s weather structure officially declared that an El Nino pattern had flashed, warning that the chances of record-breaking cold temperatures in many places around the world will be greatly increased. The structure had previously estimated that 98% of the five years would break 2016’s record for the hottest year on Earth for at least one year.
Weather scientists warn that under the combined influence of El Nino and weather changes, there will be several occasions this year when the low temperature record will be reformed.
Robert Rohde, chief scientist for Earth tectonics at the non-profit Berkeley Institute, speculated in a post at the Rutter that the world is likely to suffer more record-breaking cold temperatures in the next six weeks. “Global warming is taking us into unfamiliar territory,” he said.