2020 ties 2016 as hottest year

Last year has tied 2016 as the hottest year on record, the European Union’s climate monitoring service said yesterday, keeping earth on a global warming fast track that could devastate large swathes of humanity.

The six years since 2015 are the six warmest yet registered, as are 20 of the past 21, evidence of a persistent and deepening trend, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) reported.

Last year’s record high – a soaring 1.25°C above pre-industrial levels – was all the more alarming because it came without the help of a periodic natural weather event known as an El Nino, which added up to two-tenths of a degree to the 2016 average, according Nasa and Britain’s Met Office.

“It is quite clear that in the absence of El Nino and La Nina impacts on year-to-year temperatures, 2020 would be the warmest year on record,” said Zeke Hausfather, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute in Oakland, California.

During an El Nino, which occurs every two to seven years, warm surface water in the tropical Pacific Ocean can boost global temperatures.

In 2015, the world’s nations vowed to cap global warming “well below” 2ºC, and 1.5ºC if possible.

A subsequent report from the UN’s climate science advisory panel, the IPCC, left no doubt that 1.5ºC was the safer threshold.

With just over 1ºC of warming so far, the world has seen a crescendo of deadly droughts, heatwaves, flood-inducing rainfall, and superstorms made more destructive by rising seas.

Some regions last year experienced warming well beyond the global average, according the Copernicus report.

Europe’s average surface temperature across 2020 was a searing 2.2ºC over the pre-industrial benchmark – and nearly half a degree above 2019, the previous record year.

Warming in the Arctic region was even more spectacular, with northern Siberia and parts of the Arctic itself nearly 7 ºC above mid19th century levels.

Wildfires across Siberia lasting well into the autumn released a record quarter billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and a third more than in 2019, the previous record year.

CO2 levels in earth’s atmosphere peaked at 413 parts per million, nearly 50% more than in the early 18th century, before fossil fuel burning began to load the skies with heat-trapping greenhouse gases, C3S reported. These unprecedented levels were reached despite a 7% drop in emissions due to pandemic lockdowns. “Since CO accumulates in the

2 atmosphere like water in a bathtub, if we turn down the tap by 7%, the CO2 level just rises a bit more slowly,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, head of earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.