BRUSSELS — July 2019 has beaten July 2016 to become the hottest month ever recorded on Earth, a leading climate change institute reported on Monday.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said data showed last July’s global temperature was marginally higher than the previous record-holder three year’s ago, when the planet had experienced an El Nino warming event.

“While July is usually the warmest month of the year for the globe, according to our data it also was the warmest month recorded globally by a very small margin,” said Jean-Noel Thepaut, head of C3S, in Brussels.

“With continued greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting impact on global temperatures, records will continue to be broken in the future,” Thepault added.

July was close to 0.56 degrees Celsius above average for the 30-year period between 1981 and 2010, C3S said. It was also close to 1.2 degrees above pre-industrial level, as defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The month before last was also the hottest June in Europe and worldwide since records began more than a century ago, according to C3S.

Copernicus is the Earth observation program of the European Union, which relies to a large extent on satellite data.