ROME (AP): The world experienced its third-warmest July on record this year, according to the European Union’s climate agency on Thursday, as part of its efforts to track global warming.
This follows two consecutive years when temperatures surpassed 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.”
The EU monitoring agency stated that new temperature records and increased climate extremes are expected unless greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are reduced. On July 25, Türkiye recorded its highest-ever temperature of 50.5 degrees Celsius (122.9 degrees Fahrenheit) 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 degrees Celsius 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 degrees Celsius in July, which is 0.45 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 average for the month.
Greenhouse gases released from the burning of fossil fuels, such as gasoline, oil and coal, are the primary cause of climate change.
Despite a somewhat cooler July, the 12-month period between August 2024 and July 2025 was 1.53 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, exceeding the threshold set in 2015 to limit human-caused warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
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 of 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.
