July was Earth’s third-warmest on record, EU scientists say

ROME (AP) — The world experienced it’s third-warmest July on record this year, the European Union agency that tracks global warming said Thursday, after two consecutive years when temperatures soared past previous records.

Despite a slightly lower global average temperature, the scientists said extremes — including heat and deadly floods — persisted in July.

“Two years after the hottest July on record, the recent streak of global temperature records is over — for now. But this doesn’t mean climate change has stopped,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service. “We continued to witness the effects of a warming world.”

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The EU monitoring agency said new temperature records and more climate extremes are to be expected unless greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are brought down. On July 25, Turkey recorded it’s highest-ever temperature of 50.5 C (122.9 F) as it battled wildfires.

While not as hot as July 2023 or July 2024, the hottest and second-warmest on record, the Copernicus Climate Change Service reported that the planet’s average surface temperature last month was still 1.25 C (2.25 F) above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period, before humans began the widespread burning of oil, gas and coal.

It said the average global surface air temperature reached 16.68 C (62.02 F) in July, which is 0.45 C (0.81 F) above the 1991-2020 average for the month.

Greenhouse gases released from the burning of fossil fuels like gasoline, oil and coal are the main cause of climate change.

Despite a somewhat cooler July, the 12-month period between August 2024 and July 2025 was 1.53 C above pre-industrial levels, exceeding the threshold set in 2015 to limit human-caused warming to 1.5 C (2.7 F).

Copernicus is the European Union’s earth observation system based on satellite and on-the-ground data collection. Britain rejoined the climate agency in 2023.

Julien Nicolas, a senior Copernicus scientist, said it was important to view last month’s decrease in the context of two anomalous years in terms of warming.

“We are really coming out from a streak of global temperature records that lasted almost two years,” Nicolas said. “It was a very exceptional streak.”

He added that as long as the long-term warming trend persists, extreme weather events will continue to happen.