Earth’s string of 13 straight months with a new average heat record came to an end this past July as the natural El Nino climate pattern ebbed, the European climate agency Copernicus announced Thursday.
But July 2024 ’s average heat just missed surpassing the July of a year ago, and scientists said the end of the record-breaking streak changes nothing about the threat posed by climate change.
“The overall context hasn’t changed,” Copernicus deputy director Samantha Burgess said in a statement. “Our climate continues to warm.”
Human-caused climate change drives extreme weather events that are wreaking havoc around the globe, with several examples just in recent weeks. In Cape Town, South Africa, thousands were displaced by torrential rain, gale-force winds, flooding and more. A fatal landslide hit Indonesia’s Sulawesi island. Beryl left a massive path of destruction as it set the record for the earliest Category 4 hurricane. And Japanese authorities said more than 120 people died in record heat in Tokyo.
Those hot temperatures have been especially merciless.
The globe for July 2024 averaged 62.4 degrees Fahrenheit (16.91 degrees Celsius), which is 1.2 degrees (0.68 Celsius) above the 30-year average for the month, according to Copernicus. Temperatures were a small fraction lower than the same period last year.
It is the second-warmest July and second-warmest of any month recorded in the agency's records, behind only July 2023. The Earth also had its two hottest days on record, on July 22 and July 23, each averaging about 62.9 degrees Fahrenheit (17.16 degrees Celsius). Copernicus had previously identified July 21 and 22 as the hottest days, but changed that based on updated data.
During July, the world was 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer, by Copernicus’ measurement, than pre-industrial times. That's close to the warming limit that nearly all the countries in the world agreed to in the 2015 Paris climate agreement: 1.5 degrees.
El Nino — which naturally warms the Pacific Ocean and changes weather across the globe — spurred the 13 months of record heat, said Copernicus senior climate scientist Julien Nicolas. That has come to a close, hence July’s slight easing of temperatures. La Nina conditions — natural cooling — aren't expected until later in the year.
But there’s still a general trend of warming.
“The global picture is not that much different from where we were a year ago,” Nicolas said in an interview.
“The fact that the global sea surface temperature is and has been at record or near record levels for the past more than a year now has been an important contributing factor,” he said. “The main driving force, driving actor behind this record temperature is also the long-term warming trend that is directly related to buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."
That includes carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas.
July’s temperatures hit certain regions especially hard, including western Canada and the western United States. They baked, with around one-third of the U.S. population under warnings at one point for dangerous and record-breaking heat.
In southern and eastern Europe, the Italian health ministry issued its most severe heat warning for several cities in southern Europe and the Balkans. Greece was forced to close its biggest cultural attraction, the Acropolis, due to excessive temperatures. A majority of France was under heat warnings as the country welcomed the Olympics in late July.
Also affected were most of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, and eastern Antarctica, according to Copernicus. Temperatures in Antarctica were well above average, the scientists say.
“Things are going to continue to get worse because we haven’t stopped doing the thing that’s making them worse,” said Gavin Schmidt, climatologist and director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who wasn’t part of the report.
Schmidt noted that different methodologies or calculations could produce slightly different results, including that July may have even continued the streak. The primary takeaway, he said: "Even if the record-breaking streak comes to an end, the forces that are pushing the temperatures higher, they’re not stopping.
“Does it matter that July is a record or not a record? No, because the thing that matters, the thing that is impacting everybody," Schmidt added, "is the fact that the temperatures this year and last year are still much, much warmer than they were in the 1980s, than they were pre-industrial. And we’re seeing the impacts of that change.”
People across the globe shouldn’t see relief in July’s numbers, the experts say.
“There’s been a lot of attention given to this 13-month streak of global records," said Copernicus' Nicolas. "But the consequences of climate change have been seen for many years. This started before June 2023, and they won’t end because this streak of records is ending.”
This story has corrected the day of the agency's report to Thursday, to conform to the time of its release in Europe.
Alexa St. John is an Associated Press climate solutions reporter. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter, @alexa_stjohn. Reach her at ast.john@ap.org.
The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
A resident measures the depth of the flooded street with storm water from Tropical Storm Debby, Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024 Pooler, Ga. (AP Photo/Stephen B. Morton)
FILE - People cool off at a cooling mist spot on July 4, 2024, in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Shuji Kajiyama, File)
FLINT, Mich. (AP) — Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday made his first public appearance since Sunday’s second apparent assassination attempt against him with an overflow crowd chanting “God bless Trump!” and “Fight, Fight, Fight” as U.S. Secret Service agents surrounded the stage to protect the Republican presidential nominee.
“It’s been a great experience,” Trump said in an evening town hall in Flint, Michigan, about holding events with thousands of supporters. But he also went on to call running for president “a dangerous business” akin to car racing or bull riding.
“Only consequential presidents get shot at," he said.
Earlier in the day, Vice President Kamala Harris struck a measured tone, even steering clear of mentioning Trump by name in an interview with Black journalists that starkly contrasted with the former president's own highly contentious appearance before the same group.
The two candidates briefly put their differences aside in a phone call Trump described as “very, very nice” even as crowds booed when he mentioned Harris by her first name.
“It was very, very nice, and we appreciate that,” Trump told his supporters. Harris said earlier in the day that she told Trump “there's no place for political violence in our country.”
Both sides are ramping up campaigning with no changes to Trump's calendar despite the apparent assassination attempt at one of his Florida golf courses, which has renewed accusations by Republicans that Democrats' criticism against Trump is inspiring violent attacks. Democrats have accused Trump in the past for his long history of inflammatory campaign rhetoric and advocacy for jailing or prosecuting his political enemies. But Harris was treading more carefully in the aftermath of the second apparent attempt.
The session with the National Association of Black Journalists earlier Tuesday was one of the few extensive sit-down interviews Harris has done since replacing President Joe Biden atop the Democratic ticket in July. She repeatedly criticized Trump on issues including his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and opposition to abortion access, but was careful to refer to him as the former president and in other ways that avoided naming him directly.
Trump re-upped his past retaliation threats against election workers, donors and others as he tries to stoke fears about the integrity of the upcoming 2024 election.
He posted Tuesday on his social media site, “Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before.”
The Michigan town hall was billed as focusing on the auto industry, a pillar of the battleground state. Trump alleged Democrats would undercut American car manufacturing by pushing for the adoption of electric vehicles and repeated false claims that Chinese automakers are building large factories across the border in Mexico to flood the U.S. with vehicles.
Trump has appearances later in the week in New York, Washington, D.C., and North Carolina.
Harris has her own stops in Washington, as well as Michigan and Wisconsin in the coming days, with the two candidates overlapping in concentrating on the industrial Midwest and Pennsylvania and North Carolina — all swing areas that could decide an election expected to be exceedingly close.
Harris answered questions from three association journalists at a small, relatively quiet venue at the Philadelphia studios of public radio station WHYY. That was very different from Trump's addressing the NABJ conference in Chicago in July, when he was antagonistic to the moderators and sparked an uproar by questioning the vice president’s racial identity.
Her manner was a departure from her campaign rallies, where Harris often receives some of her loudest applause by declaring that her professional background as a prosecutor means, “I know Donald Trump's type.”
Pressed about reports of eroding support among Black male voters, Harris said she wasn't “assuming I’m gonna have it because I’m Black.” She ducked a question about whether she'd support efforts by some congressional Democrats for reparations from the government to compensate descendants of slaves for years of unpaid labor by their ancestors.
Biden has backed the idea of at least studying reparations.
So far, Biden and Harris have tried to avoid politics in their responses to Sunday’s incident, instead condemning political violence of all kinds. The president also urged Congress to increase funding to the Secret Service.
Trump has claimed, without evidence, that months of criticism against him by Harris and Biden, who call him a threat to American democracy, inspired the latest attack.
“I really believe that the rhetoric from the Democrats" is “making the bullets fly And it’s very dangerous. Dangerous for them. It’s dangerous for both sides,” Trump said in an interview with The Washington Post.
Authorities say Ryan Wesley Routh camped outside the golf course in West Palm Beach, where Trump was playing on Sunday, for nearly 12 hours with food and a rifle but fled without firing shots when a Secret Service agent spotted and shot at him.
Subsequently arrested as he drove on the highway, Routh’s past online posts suggest he has not been consistent about his politics in terms of supporting Democrats or Republicans. The attack came barely two months after Trump was wounded during a rally in Pennsylvania.
Trump also met on Tuesday with sheriff’s office deputies who activated the highway traffic stop that took Routh into custody.
Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, said at a Georgia Faith & Freedom Coalition event on Monday that “it’s popular on a lot of corners of the left to say that we have a both sides problem.” But “no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months, and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump."
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during her briefing with reporters Tuesday that there should be zero tolerance for violence-inciting rhetoric. She bristled at the suggestion that Biden and Harris have stoked division by calling Trump a threat to democracy, saying that there were concrete examples of the former president being that — such as when he helped incite an attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
In response to Vance's comments, Jean-Pierre said, “When you have that type of language out there it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous because people look up to that particular national leader, and they listen to you." She said such comments open the door for "people to take you very seriously.”
Dan Curry, 44, of Saginaw, Michigan, attended the town hall on Tuesday and said he is worried about the prospect of more violence against Trump.
“They say the Republicans are the gun-crazed lunatics trying to shoot people, but you don’t see us going after them,” said Curry, while adding these attacks may mobilize more support for Trump.
“It energizes his base,” he said. “How could it not?”
Weissert reported from Washington and Gomez Licon reported from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Associated Press writers Darlene Superville in Philadelphia, Matt Brown in Washington, Jill Colvin in New York and Tom Krisher in Detroit contributed to this report.
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris is interviewed by the National Association of Black Journalists at the WHYY studio in Philadelphia, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, left, is interviewed by National Association of Black Journalists members Gerren Keith Gaynor, far right, Eugene Daniels, second from the right, and Tonya Mosley, third from the right, at the WHYY studio in Philadelphia, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking during an unscheduled stop to greet student volunteers at Community College of Philadelphia, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, center, greeting student volunteers at an unscheduled stop at Community College of Philadelphia, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks during a town hall event at the Dort Financial Center, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024, in Flint, Mich. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump, left, on stage with Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, right, during a town hall event at the Dort Financial Center, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024, in Flint, Mich. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump waves to supporters as he arrives for a town hall event at the Dort Financial Center, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024, in Flint, Mich. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris is interviewed by members of the National Association of Black Journalists at the WHYY studio in Philadelphia, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is introduced for a town hall event at the Dort Financial Center, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024, in Flint, Mich. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, center, speaking during an unscheduled stop to talk to student volunteers at Community College of Philadelphia, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump, left, on stage with Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, right, during a town hall event at the Dort Financial Center, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024, in Flint, Mich. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris is interviewed by members of the National Association of Black Journalists at the WHYY studio in Philadelphia, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump, center, gestures as he is introduced for a town hall event at the Dort Financial Center, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024, in Flint, Mich. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris waving before boarding Air Force Two, Monday, Sept. 9, 2024, near Philadelphia International Airport, in Philadelphia, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris meets with staff on the tarmac before boarding Air Force Two, Monday, Sept. 9, 2024, near Philadelphia International Airport, in Philadelphia, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaking at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's Phoenix Awards Dinner in Washington, Saturday, Sept. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaking at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's Phoenix Awards Dinner in Washington, Saturday, Sept. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump arrives at Harry Reid International Airport to board a plane after a campaign trip, Saturday, Sept.14, 2024, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
