According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2015 easily broke the previous record for the warmest year that had been set just the previous year.
During 2015, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.62 Fahrenheit (0.90 Celsius) above the 20th century average,” said the NOAA report.
“This was the highest among all years in the 1880-2015 record.”
Compared to 2014, last year was 0.29 Fahrenheit (0.13 Celsius) warmer, the “largest margin by which the annual global temperature record has been broken.”
2015 also had ten months that set the records for warmth. Scientists believe that even without this year’s large El Nino effect, the record would have been broken but that it added to the size of the effect.
Of course this is not a record to celebrate. NASA says that that “the temperature changes are largely driven by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere.”
Remember 1997, the warmest year up to that point which climate change deniers would use as their starting point because it enabled them to claim for few years that the Earth wasn’t significantly warming? Well, that argument now goes down the tubes because 16 of the 18 years since then have been warmer.
Meanwhile, just yesterday an inept individual I am forced to work with said, “If there’s global warming, why is Taiwan’s weather the coldest in ten years?”
Taiwan will be as low as 5°C this weekend, one island near freezing. Snow is a possibility at lower elevations, not just in the mountains. Many Taiwanese have never experienced such extremes and don’t have the clothes for it nor heating in their homes. Adding insulation during construction is a foreign concept to an island that’s normally 20°C to 40°C year round, they build for typhoons and earthquakes. As always, the poor will be the most vulnerable.
left0ver1under, heh. Did you point out that in June Taiwan had an all-time heat record?
Where I live (South Australia), insulation protects from heat, not just from cold.
Duh. In every respect, not just in temperature.
This morning, on the front page of my wife’s paper, the Associated Press explained it all to me. Increasing temperature is man-made global warming. Constant or decreasing temperature is climate change. And I thought it was all about simple physics.
@ ^ waltermcc : It is all simple physics really.
Molecules of carbon dioxide gas have known physical properties -- including trapping heat. (Trapping thermal radiation -- InfraRed wavelengths.) Plus known environmental feedbacks result from increased levels of this gas among others and cause an escalating rise in planetary average temperatures.
Levels of this gas were 180 ppm in the Ice Ages. (Glacial maximums when much of Europe and North America was covered with thick ice-sheets.)
Levels of this gas were 280 ppm or so before the Industrial Revolution.
Human activities have now resulted in this gas with known heat-trapping physical properties being 400 ppm plus and rising fast.
See : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UatUDnFmNTY
So ..
Setting aside your wife’s newspaper ( good for wrapping fish and chips and rubbish and serving as a wet layer of weed-stopper beneath mulch but maybe not so much for teaching science) for a second -- what logically do you think will happen?
We add relatively large amounts of a gas with known heat trapping and climatological feedback impacts to the planet’s atmosphere the expected outcome then would be?
Observations from NASA, NOAA the CSIRO* and a great many other reputable scientific bodies** are currently showing .. ? (Hint :Scroll up here for answer among other places.)
* See : https://blog.csiro.au/2015-hottest-year-ever-recorded/
** See : https://www.opr.ca.gov/s_listoforganizations.php plus elsewhere too.
[waltermcc, FWIW, most readers here can recognise a sardonic comment.]
1998, not 1997.
But there’s been no warming since 2015!!!