“The El Nino that’s brewing now has not yet begun to affect climate significantly, so we can actually look forward, nearly certainly, to even more warming in the next year or two due to El Nino”. Globally averaged temperatures in 2015 shattered the 2014 record by 0.23 degrees Fahrenheit (0.13 Celsius).
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The official heat designation came Wednesday in a NOAA study that found the average temperature for land and sea previous year was 1.62 degrees above the 20 century average. “The last few months of 2015, particularly October, November and December were record warm anomalies for any months in the records”, says Gavin Schmidt. El Nino “pushed it [records] way over the top”, director of NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Tom Karl said.
Both NOAA and NASA have declared 2015 to be the warmest year, and December the warmest month, in recorded history-and both attribute the rising temperatures to human activity.
This is a key milestone as world leaders have set a threshold of trying to avoid warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius above that historical average.
NASA scientists and others said there’s a good chance that this year will be even hotter than 2015 worldwide, thanks to the continued El Nino.
A separate group, Berkeley Earth – a U.S. non-profit organization that says it was founded by people who saw some merit in the claims of climate change skeptics – announced similar findings last week.
This rise, in itself the second largest increase in the global average temperature ever, continues a long-term warming trend that has seen 15 of the 16 warmest years on record occurring since 2001.
“It’s getting to the point where breaking record is the norm”, Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe said.
The continental United States has had an average annual temperature hotter than the 20th century average for each of the last 19 years. In November, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeded 400 parts per million for the first time, higher than it’s been in at least 1 million years.
Global temperatures have been on a steady upward trajectory, with records being set already four times since the turn of the century.
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“2015 was warm right from the beginning; it didn’t start with El Niño”, he said.
