WASHINGTON, Aug 13 (AFP) - July was the hottest month globally ever recorded, a US scientific agency said on Friday (Aug 13), in the latest data to sound the alarm about the climate crisis.

"July is typically the world's warmest month of the year, but July 2021 outdid itself as the hottest July and month ever recorded," said Rick Spinrad, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

"This new record adds to the disturbing and disruptive path that climate change has set for the globe," Spinrad said in a statement citing data from the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).

NOAA said combined land and ocean-surface temperature was 0.93 degrees Celsius above the 20th-century average of 15.7 degrees Celsius, making it the hottest July since record-keeping began 142 years ago.

The month was 0.02 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the previous record set in July 2016, which was equaled in 2019 and 2020.

However, according to data released by the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service, last month was the third-warmest July on record globally.

Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute, said it is not unusual for agencies to have small differences in data.

"The NOAA record has more limited coverage over the Arctic than other global temperature records, which tend to show July 2021 as the second (NASA) or third (Copernicus) warmest on record," Hausfather told AFP.

"But regardless of exactly where it ends up on the leaderboards, the warmth the world is experiencing this summer is a clear impact of climate change due to human emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases," he said.

"The extreme events we are seeing worldwide - from record-shattering heat waves to extreme rainfall to raging wildfires - are all long-predicted and well understood impacts of a warmer world," he said.

"They will continue to get more severe until the world cuts its emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases down to net-zero."

Last week, a UN climate science report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provoked shock by saying the world is on course to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming around 2030.