By Isabelle Wilson-
NASA has warned of a record warm July month on record in “hundreds, if not thousands, of years,” said NASA’s top scientists in a roundtable with reporters, warning that the heat is only going to get worse.
The record for longest, consecutive stretch of 90°+ highs is 22 days set back in 1966. What makes our current heat wave different is the 90s started on July 1st, making it the first time in recorded history that July has had so many 90°+ highs in a row. Records for Roanoke go back to 1912.
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During the 1966 hot stretch, the 90s were spread across two months, starting at the end of June, and lasting through the middle of July.
“We are seeing unprecedented changes all over the world. The heatwaves that we are seeing in the US, in Europe, China, and demolishing records left, right and center. This is not a surprise,” said Gavin Schmidt, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
June of 2023 was already the hottest June on record and July is likely to be the hottest month overall. “We know from science is that human activity, principally greenhouse gas emissions, are unequivocally causing the warming we are seeing on our planet,” Kate Calvin, NASA chief scientist and senior climate adviser, said at the same briefing.
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NASA’s scientists said that data collected and analysed by the institute had already pointed towards this. “There has been a decade-on-decade increase in temperatures throughout the last four decades,” Schmidt said.
The US space agency last saw such a spike in temperatures in July and August of 2016 due to a super El Nino event in the winter of 2015-2016. While there is another such event currently in the works: “We haven’t gotten there with the current El Nino event,” Schmidt said. He added that it has “only just emerged.”
The heatwaves seen at present are due to an overall warmth across the world, particularly in the oceans.
“We’ve been seeing record-breaking sea surface temperatures, even outside of the tropics, for many months now. And we will anticipate that is going to continue, and the reason why we think that’s going to continue, is because we continue to put greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere,” Schmidt said.
The top scientist assigned a “50-50 chance” that 2023 will be the hottest year on record, only to be beaten by 2024, which is expected to be even warmer because of the ascendant El Nino. Other scientists assigned an 80% chance of 2023 being the warmest in the books.
However, weather forecasters in London have forecasted heavy rain for nine days straight with very little sign of sunshine.
It comes as two weather forecasters the Met Office and BBC Weather both suggest non-stop wet weather.
London appears to have experienced a hotter June than July so far.
The prediction from NASA came at the same time a the United States space agency says dozens of rock fragments were sent into space when it conducted a successful effort in 2022 to knock an asteroid off its path by making a satellite collide with it.
In a press release on Thursday, NASA said images captured by the Hubble space telescope show a “swarm of boulders” released after the collision, which was meant to test a method of planetary defence.
“We see a cloud of boulders carrying mass and energy away from the impact target. The numbers, sizes, and shapes of the boulders are consistent with them having been knocked off the surface of Dimorphos [the asteroid] by the impact,” David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles, a planetary scientist who uses Hubble to track changes in the asteroid, said in the press release.
“This tells us for the first time what happens when you hit an asteroid and see material coming out up to the largest sizes. The boulders are some of the faintest things ever imaged inside our solar system.”
The asteroid, known as 16 Psyche, is 173 miles wide and is thought to be made up of gold, iron, and nickel.
The asteroid’s ore is believed to be worth a staggering $10,000 quadrillion.
Although the asteroid is thought to be worth more than the entire Earth’s economy – NASA’s interest in it is purely scientific.
The space agency is hoping that the asteroid will help them learn more about planetary cores and how planets form.
In a statement, NASA said: “With less than 100 days to go before its launch, teams of engineers and technicians are working almost around the clock to ensure the orbiter is ready to journey 2.5 billion miles to a metal-rich asteroid that may tell us more about planetary cores and how planets form.”
Henry Stone, Psyche’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California said he’s feeling ‘excited’ ahead of the launch in October.
Giving an update this week, he said: “The team and I are now counting down the days to launch.
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