July, the hottest month on record

In American novel “The Great Gatsby,” there is a character called Tom Buchanan, the husband of Daisy, a beautiful but snobbish woman, and Gatsby’s rival in love. Buchanan complains that summer gets hotter every year. In the novel, the hot summer is another driver that escalates the story to a killing, the climax. Francis Scott Fitzgerald published the novel in 1925. Although it was before the term global warming was coined, people probably felt that the world got hotter every year.

NASA said that July was the hottest month on record this year since 1880 when it started keeping records on global temperatures. The space agency’s indicator is credible as it is often cited in the materials for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The indicator takes the 1951 to 1980 temperature as a base temperature, adding one point if the temperature moves above by 0.01 degrees Celsius and subtracting one point if it moves below 0.01 degrees Celsius. The July indicator was 84 points, meaning that the average temperature was 0.84 degrees Celsius higher than the base temperature.

The July indicator in 1925 when The Great Gatsby was published is minus 29 points. The indicators in July were all in the negative area for 60 years since NASA began observation in 1880, except for only once. Since 1977, the indicator began to be increasingly in the positive area in 1940 and has been only in the negative territory for 50 years since 1977. There is still controversy over the cause of global warming – whether it is natural or man-induced -- but global warming itself is certain.

The average July temperature in The Great Gatsby was at least one degrees Celsius lower than this year’s July temperature. Back then, the summer was felt hot by people because no air conditioner was in place in households in New York. Complaints exploded in Korea as people could not turn on their air conditioners for fear of getting an exorbitant electricity bill due to the progressive electricity billing system. In the hot and humid summer season, it is tough to live without air conditioners in a country where many people live in apartments in large cities. The use of air conditioners should be taken as a given, and electricity generation and the electricity billing system should be revised accordingly.