With heatwaves burning through Europe and wildfires in the US, July could set a record for being the hottest month ever.

In light of recent extreme weather events worldwide, Nasa held a media roundtable on Thursday to highlight the agency’s climate work.  

‘We are seeing unprecedented changes all over the world – the heat waves that we’re seeing in the US in Europe and in China are demolishing records, left, right and centre,’ said Gavin Schmidt, Nasa’s top climate scientist.

He added that July 2023 will probably be the world’s hottest month in ‘hundreds, if not thousands, of years’.

Schmidt currently assigned a ’50-50 chance’ of this happening based on his calculations, though he said other scientists had placed it as high as 80 per cent.

According to the scientist, the ongoing heatwaves cannot be attributed solely to the El Nino weather pattern, which ‘has really only just emerged’.

Though El Nino is playing a small role, ‘what we’re seeing is the overall warmth, pretty much everywhere, particularly in the oceans. We’ve been seeing record-breaking sea surface temperatures, even outside of the tropics, for many months now’.

‘And we will anticipate that is going to continue, and the reason why we think that’s going to continue, is because we continue to put greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere,’ said Schmidt.

‘But we anticipate that 2024 will be an even warmer year, because we’re going to be starting off with that El Nino event that’s building now, and that will peak towards the end of this year.’

Schmidt’s warnings come as the world has been buffeted by fires and dire health warnings in the past week, in addition to broken temperature records.

From the heatwave in Europe, wildfires in the United States, floods in India, and drought in Africa, Nasa said it was tracking it all.

‘The data is clear: Our Earth is warming,’ said the agency in a statement.

Nasa is committed to empowering scientists, decisionmakers, and people around the world to make data-based decisions when it comes to climate, said Nasa administrator Bill Nelson.

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