As climate change debate blows hot and cold world temperature hits a 115,000 year high

A WORRYING column in the Guardian Newspaper recently stated that 2016 was the hottest year on record, setting a new high for the third year in a row, with scientists firmly putting the blame on human activities that drive climate change. The final data for 2016 was released recently by three key agencies – the UK Met Office and NASA and NOAA in the US – and it showed that 16 of the 17 hottest years on record have been this century. Not great news as we begin 2017.

Direct temperature measurements stretch back to 1880, but scientific research indicates the world was last this warm about 115,000 years ago and that the planet has not experienced such high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for 4 million years. In 2016, global warming delivered scorching temperatures around the world. The resulting extreme weather means the impacts of climate change on people are coming sooner and with more ferocity than expected, according to scientists. The natural El Niño climate phenomenon, which helped ramp up temperatures to “shocking” levels in early 2016, has now waned, but carbon emissions were the major factor and will continue to drive rising heat.

Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said: “El Niño was a factor this year, but both 2015 and 2016 would have been records even without it.” He said about 90 per cent of the warming signal in 2016 was due to rising greenhouse gas emissions. He expects 2017 to be another extremely hot year. The new data shows the Earth has now risen about 1.1 degrees Centigrade above the levels seen before the Industrial Revolution, when large-scale fossil fuel burning began. This brings it perilously close to the 1.5 degrees target included as an aim of the global climate agreement signed in Paris in December 2015.

The declaration of 2016 as a year of record-breaking heat comes at the same time as Donald Trump takes the tiller of power in the U.S. Trump has called global warming a hoax and is filling his administration with climate change deniers and former Exxon Mobil boss Rex Tillerson. Tillerson said recently that climate change does exist but that the ability to predict the effects of greenhouse gas emissions is “very limited”, a statement most climate scientists would reject.

The three temperature records are independent, but were reached very similar conclusions. “The datasets are all singing the same song, said Arndt. The data from NOAA showed a run of 16 successive months from May 2015 to August 2016 when the global average temperature broke or equalled previous records, while no land area experienced an annual average temperature in 2016 that was cooler than the 20th Century average.

NOAA also found Arctic sea ice fell to its lowest annual average extent on record and Antarctic sea ice declined to the second smallest extent on record. The warming in the Arctic in 2016 was “astounding”, Schmidt said.

Prof Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, said: “The spate of record warm years that we have seen in the 21st Century can only be explained by human-caused climate change. The effect of human activity on our climate is no longer subtle. It’s plain as day as are the impacts – in the form of record floods, droughts, superstorms and wildfires – that it is having on us and our planet.”

“While there may be some cost in mitigating climate change, there are already major costs in damages,” according to Prof Kevin Trenberth, a scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, who estimates the costs as already tens of billions of dollars a year. “Yet if sensible approaches are implemented in the right way for cutting emissions and building resilience, the increases in energy efficiency can actually make it a net gain, not only for the planet but for everyone.”