«July 2023 is the hottest month ever»:NASA's "glass" to show global warming - The video

According to the space agency, it is now certain that the warming of the oceans brought about by El Niño is contributing to increasing the effect of human activities

July 2023 was the hottest month ever.If they weren't enough the findings of the European Union's Earth observation program Copernicus to confirm this, there are now also data from NASA, which differ slightly in the figures from the European ones but not in the verdict:it has never been so hot.Numbers can be difficult to interpret without a visual representation.For this reason the US space agency uses an eloquent graph.What you see in the images is not a designer glass, but rather the worrying path followed by the earth's temperature.Each complete revolution corresponds to a year, with the months occupying the place that in a clock would be hours.The increase in temperature, measured from 1880 to today, becomes more and more evident, and then explodes from the 1990s to today, until July 2023, which according to overseas measurements was 0.24 degrees centigrade warmer than any another July, and was 1.18 degrees warmer than the average July between 1951 and 1980.

Uneven heating

The warming was not homogeneous.“Parts of South America, North Africa, North America and the Antarctic Peninsula were particularly hot, recording temperature increases of around 4 degrees Celsius above average,” explains the NASA.«Overall, extreme heat has been linked to hundreds of illnesses and deaths.July's record continues a long-term trend of human-caused warming, driven primarily by greenhouse gas emissions that has become evident over the past four decades.The five warmest Julys since 1880 have all occurred in the last five years."In the end:«High sea surface temperatures contributed to July's record heat.The analysis shows particularly warm ocean temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific, evidence that El Niño began to develop in May 2023."However, it is unusual for El Niño to have such marked effects on the Northern Hemisphere in the first months of its formation.For this reason, NASA warns, the greatest impacts will be seen in February, March and April 2024.