AFP, Paris

The third-hottest July worldwide ended a string of record-breaking temperatures, but many regions were devastated by extreme weather amplified by global warming, the European climate monitoring service said Thursday.

Heavy rains flooded Pakistan and northern China; Canada, Scotland and Greece struggled to tame wildfires intensified by persistent drought; and many nations in Asia and Scandinavia recorded new average highs for the month.

“Two years after the hottest July on record, the recent streak of global temperature records is over,” Carlo Buontempo, director of the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, said in a statement.

“But that does not mean climate change has stopped,” he said. “We continue to witness the effects of a warming world.”

As in June, July showed a slight dip compared to the preceding two years, averaging 1.25 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial (1850-1900) era.

2023 and 2024 warmed above that benchmark by more than 1.5C, which is the Paris Agreement target set in 2015 for capping the rise in global temperatures at relatively safe levels.

That deceptively small increase has been enough to make storms, heatwaves and other extreme weather events far more deadly and destructive.

11 countries experienced their hottest July in at least a half-century, including China, Japan, North Korea, Tajikistan, Bhutan, Brunei and Malaysia, according to AFP calculations.

In Europe, Nordic countries saw an unprecedented string of hot days, including more than 20 days above 30C across Finland.