July is a hot month in the northern hemisphere. It can be beaten sometimes by August, but hopefully that won’t happen this year. Because July 2017 wasn’t a warm July, it was the hottest month ever measured in the modern global temperature record. And if that’s not depressing enough, there’s more:
July 2017 has narrowly topped July 2016 as the hottest July on record, according to a shocking analysis by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) released Tuesday. As a result, July 2017 is statistically tied with August 2016 (and July 2016) as the hottest month on record.
What’s so surprising here is that records for warmest month or year almost invariably occur when the underlying human-caused global warming trend gets a temporary boost from an El Niño’s enhanced warming in the tropical Pacific.
What that means for us civilians is the planet is warming up more than ever and the increase is squarely due to climate change forced by greenhouse gas emissions. That’s chiefly carbon dioxide released from the burning of fossil fuels, i.e., coal, oil, and natural gas. And we can’t even blame this one on the on-again, off-again, confluence of ocean currents and trade winds referred to as El Niño.
We are busy unleashing what author David Grinspoon calls planetary changes of the third kind in his remarkable book, Earth in Human Hands. Those are changes wrought, unintentionally, by global industry and individual human activity. The result is clear to see. Our planet is warming, Arctic ice is melting, wildfires are popping up in Greenland, great reefs are dying, and the oceans become more acidic every day.
Contrary to what some may believe, climate change does not, as yet, threaten the presence of life itself on Earth. The biosphere has survived much worse, life as a whole has proven to be persistent and opportunistic. But species are fragile, including H. sapiens. Climate change merely threatens the entire agricultural infrastructure underpinning all modern civilization, the vast global economic web connecting plants, oceans, animals, continents, and machines that feed, clothe, and house eight billion human beings and counting.