Yes, it’s official now that 2015 was globally the warmest year.
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What is shocking, however, is how thoroughly 2015 trounced the previous record set by 2014.
The NY Times reported that while it is hard to ascertain definitive results, the consecutive rise in global temperatures seems to indicate that the world is indeed on the irreversible upward swing of climate change.
However, most of the warming occurred in the past 35 years, with 15 of the 16 warmest years on record occurring since 2001.
All of the top ten hottest years in the historical record have occurred since 1998. In December of last year, the average surface temperatures of land and oceans around the globe was the highest on record for any month in 136 years of record keeping, according to NOAA.
The average temperature of the earth’s combined land and ocean surfaces was 1.62 degree F warmer than the 20th century average, breaking 2014’s record by a very wide margin. NASA scientists and others said there’s a good chance that 2016 will pass 2015 as the hottest year on record, thanks to El Niño.
The oceanic-atmospheric phenomenon El Niño, which is characterized by above-normal water temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean, will contribute significantly to this warming of the global mean temperature.
The short video illustrates the change in temperatures by using an orange coloured graphic which increases in density as the years go by.
“But now this strong El Niño event pushes that ocean heat back up into that atmosphere, where it gets extremely warm”. The data was collected from 6,300 weather stations across the world, including ship-based ones at sea, and Antarctic research stations.
Still, not every place on the planet had its hottest year.
“Climate change is the challenge of our generation”, said NASA administrator Charles Bolden.
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When temperatures are averaged at a global scale, the differences between years are measured in fractions of a degree. “Today’s announcement not only underscores how critical NASA’s Earth observation program is, it is a key data point that should make policy makers stand up and take notice – now is the time to act on climate”.
