The intense, deadly heat wave that scorched portions of the planet in July – which was the Earth’s hottest month on record – had “the fingerprints of climate change” all over it, according to a new report released Wednesday.
In fact, according to the report, more than 6.5 billion people – that’s 81% of the global population – experienced climate change-attributed heat in July 2023.
The report was prepared by Climate Central, an independent science communication group based in Princeton, New Jersey.
“We really are experiencing climate change just about everywhere,” said Climate Central vice president for science Andrew Pershing.
Overall, July saw record-breaking heat waves across much of North America, Asia and Europe, along with devastating heat-driven wildfires in southern Europe and in Canada. The heat has also had major impacts on people’s health, the environment and economies around the globe, the United Nations’ weather agency said last month.
Billions of people felt climate change effects in July, report says
The analysis calculated climate change attribution assessments for 4,700 cities and 200 countries around the world.
For 2 billion people, in a mostly tropical belt across the globe, climate change exacerbated the heat on each day of July. Those include the million-person cities of Mecca, Saudi Arabia and San Pedro Sula, Honduras.
In the United States, 22 U.S. cities had at least 20 days when climate change tripled the likelihood of extra heat, including Miami, Houston, Phoenix, Tampa, Las Vegas and Austin.
“The rising frequency and intensity of these devastating events is consistent with well-established scientific understanding of the consequences of carbon dioxide emissions principally from burning coal, oil, and natural gas,” the study said.
The study is not peer-reviewed, the gold standard for science, because the month just ended. However, it is based on peer-reviewed climate fingerprinting methods that are used by other groups and are considered technically valid by the National Academy of Sciences.
“Human-caused climate change influenced July temperatures for the vast majority of humanity,” Pershing said. “Across the entire planet, the average person was exposed to 11 days in which carbon pollution made the local temperature at least three times more likely. Virtually no place on Earth escaped the influence of climate change last month.”