Daily Times

WASHINGTON: Earth sizzled to its 13th straight month of record heat in May, but it wasn’t quite as much of an over-the-top scorcher as June which became the hottest month ever recorded.

In May, the record heat from Alaska to India and especially in the oceans, put the global average temperature at 60.17 degrees Fahrenheit (15.65 degrees Celsius), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, US. That’s 1.57 degrees (.87 degrees Celsius) above the 20th-century average. Last month showed increase in temperature even beyond.

In Pakistan, June 20 turned out to be the hottest day of 2015 with temperatures in some parts of Sindh nearing 50 degrees Celsius. The city of Jacobabad in northern Sindh had a high of 49 Celsius, Sibi in Balochistan 48 C, Nawabshah in interior Sindh 47 Celsius and Karachi also had its hottest day of the year at 44 C.

According to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, US, the last month was the hottest June in modern history, marking the 14th consecutive month that global heat records have been broken. “The globally averaged temperature over land and ocean surfaces for June 2016 was the highest for the month of June in the NOAA global temperature dataset record, which dates back to 1880,” NOAA said in a statement.

This marks the 14th consecutive month in which the monthly global temperature record has been broken, the longest such streak in the 137-year record. It was the warmest June since records began in the late 1800s, surpassing 2015’s historically scorching June and perhaps adding to the world’s never-before-recorded streak of incredible heat.

“We’re in a new neighborhood now as far as global temperature,” NOAA’s climate monitoring chief Deke Arndt said. “We’ve kind of left the previous decade behind.” There’s no denying the crisis is real. Global warming is real. Aside from being alarmingly hot, June also marked the month in which 31 major US scientific institutions warned Congress in a consensus letter that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research had concluded that the greenhouse gases emitted by the human activities were the primary drive.

According to the Associated Press, those signing the letter included the world’s largest scientific society, American Chemical Society, and other groups that represent meteorologists, public health experts, biologists, Earth scientists, oceanographers, geologists, crop researchers, bug, fish and reptile experts, as well as mathematicians and statisticians.

Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe said that the situation is like a doctor telling a patient that he has cancer, with the patient saying that he doesn’t. The doctor then gets every oncologist in the hospital to tell the patient it is cancer, but is treatable. It’s up to the patient. “We told you everything we could,” said Hayhoe.