July 2023 could be hottest month in 120,000 years, study finds

July will be the hottest month ever recorded and may be the hottest month in 120,000 years, according to an analysis published Thursday by Dr. Karsten Haustein, a climate scientist at Germany’s Leipzig University.

Haustein found in his analysis that July’s average temperature would be about 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than the planet was before people started burning coal, oil and gas and 0.2 degrees Celsius hotter than the previous record set in July 2019.

“Not only will it be the warmest July, but the warmest month ever in terms of absolute global mean temperature,” the researcher said. “We may have to go back thousands if not tens of thousands of years to find similarly warm conditions on our planet.”

His findings were substantiated by the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization, which on Thursday also released a statement noting that “the first three weeks of July have been the warmest three-week period on record and the month is on track to be the hottest July and the hottest month on record.”

In Israel, a near-consistent three-week-long heat wave persisted throughout the country, although according to the Israel Meteorological Service, no records have been broken yet. The maximum temperatures reached 46° Celsius in the Jordan Valley and Arava, 37° Celsius in the coastal plains and lowlands, 40° in the north of the Negev and 36° in the mountains.

“Global climate experts talk about preventing average global warming to 1.5 to two degrees Celsius,” explained Tel Aviv University professor Alon Tal. “That means some places will be lucky, and some areas will definitely be hit more. We know the Middle East is a climate hot spot where temperature increases are more extreme. One study says that the Middle East could go up seven degrees Celsius on average by the end of the century.

“Anyone who has lived in Israel a while knows there has been a profound change in summertime temperatures in Jerusalem, for example,” Tal continued. “When I was in law school in Jerusalem in the 1980s, you knew it would be cooler pretty much every summer evening. The number of cool evenings in Jerusalem has dwindled. We have one study that points to 30-degree temperatures in the evening. It’s astonishing.”

The German analyst Haustein said temperatures will continue to increase unless fossil fuel use is drastically cut worldwide.

Extreme heat due to 'human-induced climate change'

“THE EXTREME HEAT and related temperatures we are seeing this summer are because of human-induced climate change,” said Dr. Tess Winkel, Climate and Human Health Fellow at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in response to the analysis. “We can stop this global phenomenon by ending our reliance on fossil fuels that make extreme heat more common.”

Another scientist, Dr. Laurence Wainwright of Oxford University, said, “We need to work quickly to mitigate carbon emissions. We are, quite literally, playing with fire, and it is time to stop.”

Earlier this week, a separate study by World Weather Attribution scientists found that without human-induced climate change, the extreme heat waves that burned across North America, Europe and China this month, causing forest fires, water shortages and even death, would have been “extremely rare.”

Moreover, heat waves are “extremely dangerous,” according to Israeli public health physician and epidemiologist Prof. Hagai Levine.

He highlighted a study published in Nature Medicine last month that estimated nearly 62,000 heat-attributable deaths between May 30 and September 4, 2022, in Europe – the hottest summer ever recorded in the region.

Relatedly, “more Israelis die every year from air pollution than from terror, traffic accidents and domestic violence combined,” said Israeli-American environmentalist Yosef Abramowitz, a board member of the Israeli Union of Environmental NGOs and a leader of the President’s Climate Forum. He estimated that around 2,000 Israelis die annually due to environmental hazards.

“We have consistently seen an increase in the health impacts of climate change through our heat-related indicators: heat-related deaths among the elderly are rising, productivity is decreasing globally because of the heat, affecting people’s livelihoods and well-being,” said Dr. Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown on Climate Change and Health, which monitors the evolving health profile of climate change. “This is the human cost of a profound lack of commitment to tackling the climate crisis and an early sign of what will be a much more catastrophic future unless we take urgent action to change course.”

Tal called on the Israeli government to use this report as a wake-up call. Israel has been lagging behind its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 27% by 2030 compared to 2015.

“We must consider greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as a blanket you put over yourself. As the blanket gets thicker and thicker, it gets warmer,” Tal explained.

“I would like the government to have emergency meetings to think about our climate strategy.”

The Environment and Climate Change portal is produced in cooperation with the Goldman Sonnenfeldt School of Sustainability and Climate Change at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The Jerusalem Post maintains all editorial decisions related to the content.

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