2020 on track to be hottest year ever recorded
This year is on course to be the hottest on record after a Siberian heatwave, forest fires and record Death Valley temperatures, according to new data.
It is heading to be at least the second-hottest ever — and could even pip 2016 as the warmest when all the data is analysed, leading climate agencies have forecast.
Even if it is knocked into second spot, it will be more significant in climate-change terms than 2016, when the heat was turbocharged by an El Nino ocean-warming event.
This year achieved its recordbreaking temperatures despite being moderated by the cooling of a La Nina weather event, the opposite of El Nino.
It has been a year marked by unprecedented forest fires on three continents, the first breaching of the 37C barrier on the thermometer within the Arctic Circle and the hottest-ever air temperature recorded on Earth: 54.4C in California’s Death Valley in August.
One of 2020’s notable hotspots has been Siberia, which has been covered by an angry, deep-red blotch on global temperature maps. The region has been exceptionally hot since the beginning of the year, contributing to January being the planet’s warmest on record. At one point the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk recorded a figure of 38C. If that is verified by the World Meteorological Organisation, it would be the first time recorded temperatures above the Arctic Circle have surpassed 37C.
As of the end of November, 2020 is the second-warmest year on the books according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose records go back 141 years.
Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which keeps the agency’s temperature records, calculated it has a more than 90 per cent chance of becoming the hottest year and a 95 per cent chance of being in the top two warmest years with above-average temperatures prevalent over large swathes of the globe.
Nine of the 10 hottest years on record have been in the past decade, according to weather records — 1998 is the one 20th-century year that remains in the top 10 warmest.