World swelters to unofficial hottest day on record

The entire planet sweltered to the unofficial hottest day in human recordkeeping on July 3, according to University of Maine scientists at the Climate Reanalyzer project.

High-temperature records were surpassed on July 3 and 4 in Quebec and northwestern Canada and Peru.

Cities across the United States from Medford, Oregon to Tampa, Florida have been hovering at all-time highs, said Zack Taylor, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. Beijing reported 9 straight days last week when the temperature exceeded 35 C (95 F).

This global record is preliminary, pending approval from gold-standard climate measurement entities like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. But it is an indication that climate change is reaching into uncharted territory.

It legitimately captures global-scale heating and NOAA will take these figures into consideration when it does its official record calculations, said Deke Arndt, director of the National Center for Environmental Information, a division of NOAA.

“In the climate assessment community, I don't think we'd assign the kind of gravitas to a single day observation as we would a month or a year,'' Arndt said.

The global daily average temperature for July 3 came in at 17.01 degrees Celsius or 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer, a common tool often used by climate scientists for a good glimpse of the world's condition. 

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