NASA and NOAA confirmed the combination of global warming and a powerful El Niño made 2015 hottest since records began in 1880. NASA has said that the temperature changes have been majorly driven by increased carbon dioxide and other human-released emissions.
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On Wednesday scientists from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that temperatures last year had soared above those in 2014, previously the hottest year on record. The global land and ocean average surface temperature for 2015 was the highest of any year, reaching its peak in December when the month also hit the highest global average surface temperature of any month in record.
That’s 1.62 (F) degrees hotter than any average year in the 20th century.
Phillips said Canada overall has been warmer than normal for 19 consecutive years while, globally, 14 of the 15 warmest years ever recorded have occurred since 2000.
“Since 1997, which at the time was the warmest year on record, 16 of the subsequent 18 years have been warmer than that year”, said the NOAA report.
“During the final month, the December combined global land and ocean average surface temperature departure from average was the highest on record for any month in the 136-year record”, NOAA’s release said. And it beat the previous 2014 record by roughly one quarter of a degree, the second-largest year-over-year margin.
2015 was an year of extremes.
NASA, which used the same raw temperature data, but different methods to analyze Earth’s polar regions and global temperatures, calculated a slightly smaller figure of 0.23 degrees Fahrenheit – the largest yearly jump since 1998.
“2015 was remarkable even in the context of the ongoing El Niño”, said Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in the statement.
According to Dr Tom Karl, director of NOAA National Centres for Environmental Information, new heat records would have been set even without the El Nino weather phenomenon, which leads to warmer waters in the equatorial Pacific.
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“This trend needs to be reversed if we’re to keep global warming below 2°C, the goal of the worldwide climate agreement struck in Paris and the number that scientists believe will avoid irreversible changes to Earth’s systems”, Caldas said.
