2017 was among the planet’s hottest years on record
Government scientists reported Thursday that 2017 was among the hottest years ever recorded.
The year was the second-hottest in recorded history, NASA said, while scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported 2017 was the third- warmest they have ever recorded.
The two government agencies use different methodologies to calculate global temperatures, but by either standard, the 2017 results make the past four years the hottest period in their 138-year archive.
“The planet is warming remarkably uniformly,” Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told reporters Thursday.
The renewed evidence of climate change, driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases, comes as the Trump administration moves to open new areas for oil drilling and rolls back regulations that sought to reduce global warming, most prominently by moving to repeal the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. The administration said it would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement last year.
This has prompted a counter-reaction — with some states, like California, doubling down on climate policies, such as the state’s cap-and-trade system — but the fact remains that it is far from clear at the moment whether a recent trend of slowly declin- ing U. S. greenhouse gas emissions will continue. In 2018, the U. S. Energy Information Administration just predicted, emissions should actually rise by about 1.7 percent.
“The climate has changed and is always changing,” said White House principal deputy press secretary Raj Shah in a statement in response to the new temperature findings. “To address climate change as well as other risks, the U.S. will continue to promote access to affordable and re- liable energy and support technology, innovation and the development of modern and efficient infrastructure in order to reduce emissions and effectively address future climate related risks.”
The Environmental Protection Agency referred the Post to a recent interview with Reuters in which administrator Scott Pruitt also acknowledge that the climate “is changing” but said, “That’s not the debate. The debate is how do we know what the ideal surface temperature is in 2100?... I think the American people deserve an open honest transparent discussion about those things.”
A number of scientists have faulted Pruitt’s idea of hosting a governmentwide debate about climate change this year, which may be through a “red team/ blue team” exercise in which outside scientists would challenge and critique the work of government researchers.
Further stirring the climate debate, 2017 was a year of record- breaking disasters affecting the United States, including devastating California wildfires and a trio of hurricanes that cost over $200 billion— events of the sort many experts fear may worsen.
In 2017, a temperature of 1.51 degrees Fahrenheit was noted, above the average temperature seen in the 20th century, according to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.
NASA found that 2017 was 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit (. 9 degrees Celsius) above the average temperature from 1951 through 1980. Data show 2016 was .99 degrees Celsius higher, and 2015 just .86 degrees Celsius higher, according to the agency.
Before 2017, the years 2014, 2015, and 2016 had set new all-time temperature records in stepwise fashion — culminating in a dramatic new high in 2016 — and NASA and NOAA had both agreed on their rankings as they occurred. 2017, in contrast, merely stayed within the elevated temperature range these prior years had already established.
2017 was unequivocally the warmest year on record that was not substantially influenced by the periodic El Niño phenomenon, which releases added warmth from the Pacific Ocean and was present in the record warm years of 2015 and 2016.
1998, for instance, was at the time a record year for global temperatures, as it coincided with a very strong El Niño — but 2017’s temperature now comfortably surpasses it.
NASA and NOAA presented the following slide in a briefing Thursday to show the planet has continued to warm throughout fluctuations in this cycle in the Pacific Ocean:
NASA’s Schmidt noted El Niño probably boosted the temperatures of the warmest year on record, 2016, by .12 degrees, but did not affect 2017 at all— suggesting if not for natural variability, 2017 might have been the warmest year on record.