June 2019 was hot. It was so hot, it’s set the record in Europe and across the globe as the hottest June ever recorded.
Even before the heatwave that blanketed Europe at the end of the month, temperatures were usually above the average recorded for this time of year.
Data provided by the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service has shown that the temperature not only passed the previous record, it completely obliterated it.
In total, the month was 0.54°C warmer than the average June from 1981-2010 and 0.11°C warmer than June 2016, the second warmest June on record.
Thanks to warm air brought up from Africa, parts of Europe including Spain, Italy, France, Germany and Austria were up to 10℃ hotter than normal.
Experts said the heatwave was caused by a 2,000 mile wide plume of hot air being blown over from Africa by an unusually strong jet stream.
Naturally, there’s also the constant spectre of climate change.
‘Is this climate change? What we scientists can say with absolute confidence is that as the world heats up, potentially lethal heatwaves will become more common in many parts of the world, including Europe,’ said Hannah Cloke Professor of Hydrology, University of Reading, writing in The Conversation.
‘The atmospheric and climate systems that create heatwaves are fiendishly complicated. Accounting for all the drivers of June’s heatwave will take time and an immense amount of data crunching by some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers,’ she said.
Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at Potsdam University, tweeted: ‘Heatwaves are silent killers.
‘The 2003 European heat wave has caused about 70,000 fatalities.
‘Last year’s hot summer in Germany has been estimated to have caused at least 1,000 excess deaths.’
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