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

High temperature records were surpassed July 3 and 4 in Quebec and northwestern Canada and Peru. Cities across the US 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.

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, reports AP.

“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. Scientists generally use much longer measurements -- months, years, decades -- to track the Earth’s warming. In addition, this preliminary record for the hottest day is based on data that only goes back to 1979, the start of satellite record-keeping, whereas NOAA’s data goes back to 1880.

But Arndt added that we wouldn’t be seeing anywhere near record-warm days unless we were in “a warm piece of what will likely be a very warm era” driven by greenhouse gas emissions and the onset of a “robust” El Nino.

An El Nino is a temporary natural warming of parts of the central Pacific Ocean that changes weather worldwide and generally makes the planet hotter.

Human-caused climate change is like an upward escalator for global temperatures, and El Nino is like jumping up while standing on that escalator, Arndt said.

Bd-pratidin English/Golam Rosul