“Not a record to celebrate”: Humanity just experienced the hottest day in recorded history

For Americans, the Fourth of July is associated with fireworks, flag-waving, festivities and family time. Yet July 4, 2023, is going to enter the history books for a different reason: The United States National Centers for Environmental Prediction discovered that it was the hottest day in recorded human history, maxing out at 17.01 degrees Celsius (62.62 degrees Fahrenheit). The previous record of 16.92 degrees Celsius (62.46 degrees Fahrenheit) had been set in August 2016 — but experts predict it probably won’t take seven years for this new record to be broken. It may not even take until the end of this summer.

“It’s not a record to celebrate, and it won’t be a record for long, with northern hemisphere summer still mostly ahead and El Niño developing,” Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment in the U.K., told CNN.

A recent study published in the scientific journal PNAS revealed that so-called compound drought and heatwaves, or CDHW events, will happen roughly twice a year all over the world. The study’s co-author Dr. Michael E. Mann, a professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania, told Salon that he urges people not to accept the current series of brutal heatwaves as a “new normal.” Instead, Mann described it as “a ‘new abnormal,'” one that “will only get worse and worse as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels and generate carbon pollution.”