July of this year to be the hottest on record, with the previous five hottest Julys all in the past five years.
"Just look around you and you'll see what's happened," NASA administrator Bill Nelson said during the conference."We have record flooding in Vermont. We have record heat in Phoenix and in Miami. We have major parts of the country that have been blanketed by wildfire smoke and, of course, what we are watching in real-time is the disaster that has occurred in Hawaii with wildfires.
They attribute this record heat in part to El Niño, which occurs about every two to seven years when winds above the Pacific ocean, which normally blow to the west along the equator from South America towards Asia, break their routine and drift east and toward the U.S. west coast. As a result, Canada and the U.S. witness much warmer conditions than usual.
"Exceptionally high sea surface temperatures, fueled in part by the return of El Niño, were largely responsible for the summer's record warmth," Josh Willis, who is a climate scientist and oceanographer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in a. His team predicts the biggest impacts from this climate pattern will unfold February through April next year.
However, as Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist and director of GISS, explained during July's conference, natural weather patterns like El Niño contribute minimally to climate change when compared to human activities driving global warming. El Niño in particular is calculated to lead to a temporary temperature increase of about 0.1 degrees Celsius, according to