This July 4 Was the Earth’s Hottest Day on Record

It hasn't been this hot in over 100,000 years, some scientists suggest.

Hot Ones

Your grill wasn't the only thing sizzling yesterday.

In fact, this year's July 4 was the hottest day since records began, according to climate data from the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction.

As The Washington Post reports, some scientists think yesterday was also one of the hottest days on our planet in the last 125,000 years, give or take a millennium or two.

Average temperatures worldwide shot up to a blistering 62.92 degrees Fahrenheit — the hottest it has been since at least 1979 when scientists began estimating daily average temperatures.

The temperature spike is due to a mixture of global warming, summer heating up in parts north of the equator, and the return of the El Niño weather pattern fanning the flames, The Washington Post reports.

"It’s a triple whammy," Myles Allen, Oxford University professor of geosystem science, told the WP.

Warming Trend

What's especially troubling was that previously, July 3 was the hottest day — a worrying record that was broken the very next day. Before that, the hottest average temperature was 62.46 degrees Fahrenheit on August 14, 2016.

This previous record also happened during an El Niño year, a scorching twelve months filled with reports of bleached coral in the Great Barrier Reef and heat waves that killed livestock and crops and left scores of people without water, as CBS News reported at the time.

In other words, the situation in 2023 is looking pretty grim.

"Looking to the future, we can expect global warming to continue and hence temperature records to be broken increasingly frequently, unless we rapidly act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero," said Paulo Ceppi, climate scientist at Grantham Institute in London, to the WP.

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