By Charlotte Van Campenhout
BRUSSELS (Reuters) -Last month was Earth’s third warmest July since records began and included a record national temperature in Turkey of 50.5 degrees Celsius (122.9 Fahrenheit), scientists said on Thursday.
Last month continued a trend of extreme climate conditions that scientists attribute to man-made global warming, even though there was a pause in record-breaking temperatures for the planet.
According to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), the average global surface air temperature reached 16.68 C in July, which is 0.45 C above the 1991-2020 average for the month.
“Two years after the hottest July on record, the recent streak of global temperature records is over – for now,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of C3S.
“But this doesn’t mean climate change has stopped. We continued to witness the effects of a warming world in events such as extreme heat and catastrophic floods in July.”
While not as hot as the record-setting July 2023 and second-warmest July 2024, Earth’s average surface temperature last month was still 1.25 C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period, when humans began burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale.
Moreover, the 12-month period from August 2024 to July 2025 was 1.53 C warmer than pre-industrial levels, exceeding the 1.5 C threshold that was set as a maximum in the Paris Agreement that sought to curb global warming and entered into force in 2016.
The main cause of climate change is the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels.
Last year was the world’s hottest year ever recorded.
The world has not yet officially surpassed the 1.5 C target, which refers to a long-term global average temperature over several decades.
However, some scientists argue that staying below this threshold is no longer realistically achievable. They are urging governments to accelerate cuts to CO2 emissions to reduce the extent of the overshoot and curb the rise in extreme weather events.
The C3S has temperature records dating back to 1940, which are cross-referenced with global data reaching as far back as 1850.
(Reporting by Charlotte Van CampenhoutEditing by Frances Kerry)
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