June was a miserably, dangerously hot month in Europe, and that heat pushed the average global temperature to an all-time high.
“During the last week of June temperatures spiked by as much as 18 degrees Fahrenheit above normal across Central and Western Europe. It was 115 degrees in a village in southern France on Friday [June 28], the hottest temperature ever recorded in the country,” reports the New York Times.
Overall, Europe was about 2 degrees Fahrenheit hotter in June than the previous record for the month — a record set just three years ago. And that helped raise the worldwide average temperature to about 0.2 degrees above the previous record, says the Times, citing the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.
“A preliminary analysis of the heat wave in France found that climate change had made it at least five times more likely than a heat wave would have been otherwise,” the Times says.
“But even without a full analysis, scientists say, periods of extreme heat like the one last week … are generally in keeping with the overall warming of Earth that has occurred because of human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.”