NASA Clocks July 2023 as Hottest Month on Record Ever Since 1880

Human-driven climate change pushed global temperatures to never-before-seen heights in July, according to new data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA. The month is now officially the hottest July on record since record-taking began in the 1800s.

And it wasn’t even close: the month was a whopping 0.4 °F warmer than the previous record set in 2019, and well over 2.1 °F hotter than the 20th century average.

“Most records are set in terms of global temperature by a few hundredths of a degree,” says Russell Vose, a climate expert at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. But this one, nearly half a degree Fahrenheit, was “bigger than any other jump we’ve seen.”

That was not what Vose expected to see. “I am rarely surprised, that’s what my friends tell me. And I was surprised by this number.”

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Because there is more land in the Northern Hemisphere than the Southern Hemisphere, we have a greater impact on global temperature than the other hemisphere.  Thus, the global pattern is that July is the hottest month of the year, and the hottest July ever inevitably becomes the hottest month ever.