July is shaping up to be the Earth’s hottest month in recorded history

Temps in the US rn are like a pizza just out of the oven – hot, hot, hot.

But it’s not just America that’s experiencing a heat wave. According to the World Meteorological Organization and the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, July is shaping up to be the world’s hottest month in recorded history.

🌡️📈 Behind the global heat wave: Climate scientists point to a confluence of factors – human-caused climate change, the El Niño weather system, fewer aerosols in the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s heat, and the underwater Tongan volcano eruption from 2022 that added water vapor to the atmosphere, to name a few.

But regardless of the cause, global temps have been hotter than Dua Lipa performing live. In fact, 21 of the first 23 days of July were warmer than any previous days in human record (which dates back to the 1940s).

• Though to be fair, when talking about a planet that’s been around for about 4.5 billion years, around 80 years of temperature data may not provide a full picture. But scientists have used tree rings, ice cores, and other proxies to calculate that July 2023 is most likely the hottest month in about 120,000 years.

🥵🇺🇲 Closer to home: More than half of the US – 182 million people – were under a heat alert this morning, per the National Weather Service. This is expected to persist through the weekend.