July Was Hottest Month in History of Contiguous US, Breaking Dust Bowl Record

This article was originally published in Common Dreams under Creative Commons 3.0 license. Read the original article. Contact: editor@commondreams.org

By Jessica Corbett

While President Donald Trump continued his war on renewables and support for climate-wrecking fossil fuels, the contiguous United States endured the hottest July on record, according to data released Monday by his own government.

“July 2026 averaged 76.9ºF, the warmest month on record (1895-present),” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced. That figure was “3.3ºF above the 20th-century average. This was the warmest July—and warmest month—in the 132-year record, 0.1-0.2ºF warmer than July 1936 and July 2012.”

The Associated Press highlighted that last month’s average for the Lower 48 eclipsed “the Dust Bowl’s July 1936 by an eighth of a degree,” a development that meteorologist Jeff Masters of Yale Climate Connections described as alarming.

“It’s not good when you’re breaking records from the Dust Bowl, which we are in this case,” he told the AP. “And that was a crazy sort of situation where you put tens of millions of people in motion. You had this great migration because of the drought and the heat that hit the center of the US—just a cataclysmic event in US history. If we’re exceeding records from the Dust Bowl, that says that we’re in deep trouble.”

See also: Wildfires: Why Media Coverage Doesn’t Always Make the Climate Connection

Separately, Masters and fellow meteorologist Bob Henson wrote at Yale Climate Connections that “there’s no denying the scorching conditions of the 1930s Dust Bowl. An impressive 24 of the 48 contiguous US states have yet to exceed the single hottest readings observed in each of those states during the 1930s.”

“A 2022 study, ‘How the Great Plains Dust Bowl drought spread heat extremes around the Northern Hemisphere,’ showed how the Dust Bowl’s physical influence extended well beyond US borders,” the pair added. “As lead author Gerald Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research put it, ‘This is a mechanism that arose in a unique way from human influence—not by burning fossil fuels but from plowing up the middle third of the US.’”

Wildfires broke out across Canada and in the United States’ Pacific Northwest last month, burning over 140,000 acres in Oregon alone. NOAA found that “daytime maximum temperatures averaged 89.5ºF, 2.9ºF above average, ranking as the sixth-warmest month on record for average high temperatures, while overnight minimum temperatures averaged 64.2ºF, 3.7ºF above average, ranking as the warmest month on record for average low temperatures, surpassing July 2022 by 0.7ºF.”

Those high temperatures overnight can be dangerous. Masters told the AP that “if you’re talking heatwaves, that nighttime low is incredibly important for determining total heat stress... So if it doesn’t cool off at night, your body doesn’t have time to readjust to all the heat.”

While July set a new record in the United States, because of the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis, “this may be one of the coolest years we’re gonna experience for the rest of our lives,” the meteorologist also said. He added that humanity needs “to stop burning so many fossil fuels. We also need to be spending money to adapt to the new climate that we’ve put in place.”

See also: Human-Caused Climate Emergency Made Canada’s Summer Wildfires Twice as Likely: Study

Wildfires also impacted the European Union last month—and NOAA’s new numbers came out as the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced Monday that worldwide, last month was second warmest July on record, tied with 2024. The agency also found that the average global ocean surface temperature was the hottest ever recorded in July, fueled in part by El Niño conditions.

“Our leaders’ response has to be swifter and stronger than El Niño,” argued Anne Jellema, executive director of the advocacy group 350.org. “We already know that global heating is supercharging extreme weather damage, and the public wants polluters to pay for it. With Big Oil’s earnings skyrocketing while a global food crisis looms, now is the time to act. The only way to stave off a humanitarian disaster is to make those causing it pay upfront—before even more damage is done.”

The Guardian pointed out that “an unusually strong El Niño event, a periodic climate feature where a section of the Pacific Ocean heats up causing weather around the world to alter, is likely to cause next year to be the hottest on record globally, surpassing a record set just in 2024. Some scientists think the developing El Niño could even ensure that this year is the one that breaks the record.”

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, told the newspaper that “the bottom line... is that we expect to set record global temperatures as long as carbon emissions continue to warm the planet, and typically these records are set during major El Niño events.”

[KS]

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