I'm still in Southern Hemisphere Winter down here and with low rainfall and clear skies at night, it can be a bit chilly in the morning. It's about 5 am as I type and I've got a blanket on my feet but the sun will be up soon and as the day presses on it will warm up. Sydney isn't cold in winter. It can feel cold because many houses are drafty and poorly insulated. Even so, July was relatively warm for the season.
"Mean daily maximum temperatures averaged over Greater Sydney were highest on record for July (since 1900) while minimum temperatures were generally above their monthly averages."
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/month/nsw/sydney.shtml
Meanwhile, across the Pacific Chile is very much not chilly:
"Having temperatures of 37 degrees (99 degrees Fahrenheit) in the middle of southern winter is extraordinary," said Raul Cordero, a climatologist at the University of Santiago. "It is a temperature anomaly of almost 15 degrees above typical values and unfortunately it is not a local problem, it is a global problem.""
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2023-08-03/winter-heat-wave-in-chile-offers-window-to-warmer-world
Heatwaves in the Northern Hemisphere summer are easy for those in denial about global warming to dismiss but the reality is that July was globally hot. It was warm, it was very warm. There is an El Niño brewing in the Pacific but as of 1 August the Australian Bureau of Meteorology hasn't officially declared one is underway, so it wasn't the usual culprit.
So how hot is it?
I used to semi-regularly post the UAH Satellite temperature record available on Dr Roy Spencer's website. This wasn't because it is the best temperature record or because Spencer is a reliable authority but because Spencer is at best a sceptic and because the satellite record once upon a time was the prefered data set of those trying to deny or minimise global warming. In short, using the UAH record cuts through a bunch of pointless conspiracy theory style arguments. It's not urban heat island or poorly placed weather stations or woke academics somehow fabricating the temperature record. This data is presented by a right-wing evangelical who is a regular on the global warming denialist circuit and relies on data from orbit.
Let's see how it is doing - July 2023 is the blue dot at the end
According to Spencer (see caveats above):
"July 2023 was an unusual month, with sudden warmth and a few record or near-record high temperatures.
Since the satellite record began in 1979, July 2023 was:
• warmest July on record (global average)
• warmest absolute temperature (since July is climatologically the warmest month)
• tied with March 2016 for the 2nd warmest monthly anomaly (departure from normal for any month)
• warmest Southern Hemisphere land anomaly
• warmest July for tropical land (by a wide margin, +1.03 deg. C vs. +0.44 deg. C in 2017)"
https://www.drroyspencer.com/2023/08/uah-global-temperature-update-for-july-2023-0-64-deg-c/
It's too early to be the potential El Niño and that in itself should be very disturbing because the short-term peaks tend to align with El Niño events and we may be getting one later this year.
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