The world experienced its third-hottest July on record last month, the European climate monitoring service said Thursday, with parts of Asia and Scandinavia suffering record-high temperatures even as the global average dipped slightly.

The third-hottest July worldwide ended a string of record-breaking temperatures last month, but many regions were still devastated by extreme weatheramplified by global warming, the European climate monitoring service said Thursday.

Heavy rains floodedPakistanand northernChina;Canada,ScotlandandGreecestruggled to tamewildfiresintensified by persistent drought; and many nations in Asia and Scandinaviarecorded new average highsfor the month.

"Two years after the hottest July on record, the recent streak of global temperature records is over," Carlo Buontempo, director of the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service, said in a statement.

"But that does not mean climate change has stopped," he said. "We continue to witness the effects of a warming world."

A misleading dip

As in June, Julyshowed a slight dipcompared to the preceding two years, averaging 1.25 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial era.

2023 and 2024 warmed above that benchmark by more than 1.5C, which is the Paris Agreement target set in 2015 for capping the rise in global temperatures at relatively safe levels.

That deceptively small increase has been enough to make storms, heatwaves and other extreme weather events far more deadly and destructive.

"We continued to witness the effect of a warming world in events such as extreme heatwaves and catastrophicfloodsin July," Buontempo said.

Last month, temperatures exceeded 50C in the Gulf, Iraq and for the first timeTurkey, while torrential rains killed hundreds of people in China and Pakistan.

InSpain, more than a thousand deaths were attributed by a public institute to the heat in July, half as many as in the same period in 2024.

The main source of the CO2 driving up temperatures is well known: the burning of oil, coal and gas to generate energy.

"Unless we rapidly stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, we should expect not only new temperature records but also a worsening of impacts," Buontempo said.

Regional contrasts

Global average temperatures are calculated using billions of satellite and weather readings, both on land and at sea, and the data used by Copernicus extends back to 1940.

Even if July was milder in some places than in previous years, 11 countries experienced their hottest July in at least a half-century, including China,Japan,North Korea,Tajikistan,Bhutan,BruneiandMalaysia, according to AFP calculations.

InEurope, Nordic countries saw anunprecedented string of hot days, including more than 20 days above 30C acrossFinland.

More than half of Europe along with the Mediterranean region experienced the worst drought conditions in the first part of July since monitoring began in 2012, according to an AFP analysis of data from the European Drought Observatory (EDO).

In contrast, temperatures were below normal in North andSouth America,Indiaand parts ofAustraliaandAfrica, as well as inAntarctica.

Seas still overheating

Last month was also the third-hottest July on record for sea surface temperatures.

Locally, however, several ocean records for July were broken: in the Norwegian Sea, in parts of the North Sea, in the North Atlantic west of France and Britain.

The extent ofArcticsea ice was 10 percent below average, the second lowest for a July in 47 years of satellite observations, virtually tied with the readings of 2012 and 2021.

Diminishing sea ice is a concern not because it adds to sea levels, but because it replaces the snow and ice that reflect almost all the Sun's energy back into space with deep blue ocean, which absorbs it.

Ninety percent of the excess heat generated by global warming is absorbed by the oceans.

In Antarctica, sea ice extent is the third lowest on record for this month.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

Originally published on France24