2016 warmest year on record for third year

AFTER 12 months of heat waves, wildfires, and severe storms around the world, it’s official: 2016 was the warmest year on record. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Wednesday that Earth’s average surface temperature last year was 14.82 degrees Celsius., the highest since worldwide record-keeping began in 1880. This also makes 2016 the third year of record-setting warmth in a row, a finding that NASA confirmed using a different method.

In scientists’ view, this three-in-arow trend makes the 2016 data especially significant. Years of record warmth were once anomalies. Now, many argue, they signal a shift: Human burning of fossil fuels is pushing Earth’s climate into warmer territory.

“A single warm year is something of a curiosity,” Deke Arndt, NOAA’s chief of global climate monitoring, told The New York Times. “It’s really the trend, and the fact that we’re punching at the ceiling every year now, that is the real indicator that we’re undergoing big changes.”

Scientists attribute these “big changes” primarily to human emissions of greenhouse gases. Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, says that 12 percent of last year’s record heat was caused by the cyclical El Niño phenomenon, while the rest likely originated with burning of fossil fuels.

A warmer climate made itself felt worldwide last year. According to Dr. Schmidt, the Arctic stayed “enormously warm.” Near the Equator, India set a temperature record on May 19, with the town of Phalodi reaching a sweltering 51 degrees Celsius, according to The New York Times.

In addition to higher temperatures, 2016 saw several natural disasters, ranging from wildfires in Alberta, Canada, to hurricane Matthew in the Caribbean, that scientists predict will become more common as the atmosphere retains more heat.

Rising temperatures are also taking their toll on the world’s oceans. In September, The Christian Science Monitor reported:

“The ocean has played a disproportionate role in mitigating the effects of human caused climate change, but increasingly extreme storms, bleaching coral, and massive fish die-offs are indications that the oceans can’t take much more.”

The latest bleak news on climate change comes three months after the Paris Climate Accord, in which 125 nations agreed to lower greenhouse gas emissions enough to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, went into effect.

Sceptics of climate change continually worry about the science but this time the scientists have the evidence

Two of the leading agencies that monitor Earth’s climate, NASA and NOAA, stated that their data confirmed the record. Both agencies use slightly different methodologies. NASA uses 6,300 surface temperature measurements from weather stations, ships and buoys. They also use temperature data from polar research locations. Their analysis also accounts for spacing of the stations and urban heat island effects that climatologists have long understood. They compare their results to a baseline period of 1951 to 1980. NOAA uses a different baseline period and considers polar contributions in a different way. Even with such differences, both agencies arrived at similar conclusions about 2016.

More importantly, the record is not just confirmed by U.S. science agencies or surface-based datasets. The United Kingdom’s Met Office was consistent with NASA data and showed an increase over 2015. The Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA) also crowned 2016 the warmest year on record based on its data analysis and techniques. This is significant because there has been an ongoing dispute between research groups that use surface and satellite-based methods for temperature measurement. Multiple threads of evidence from different approaches arriving at similar conclusions is the very essence of consilience.

NOAA’s estimate for 2015 was an average global temperature of 14.84 degrees Celsius.

This is 0.04 Celsius larger than the previous record year. NASA’s numbers, which includes a methodology that takes into account more of the Arctic region, was 0.12 Celsius warmer. If you have followed the Arctic in 2016, you know that the Arctic was particularly warm and the North Pole set a couple of records.

The margin observed by NOAA is one of the largest the agency has observed between consecutive record years according to Deke Arndt, Chief of the Climate Monitoring Branch at NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information. In a conference call with reporters Arndt noted, “it is larger than the typical margin.”

Climate scientists clearly articulated that human or anthropogenic factors were significant contributors to the 2016 warming, NASA’s press release points out,

The planet’s average surface temperature has risen about 1.1 degrees Celsius since the late 19th century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere.

However, natural processes certainly also contributed. The strong 2015 El Niño dissipated in early 2016 but scientists estimate that about 0.2 degrees of the record anomaly was related to El Niño. It is well-established that El Niño years can amplify warming. What makes the 2016 record rather remarkable is that it was primarily a La Niña year.

Record sea ice deficits likely played a role also and may even be self-amplifying. — Christian Science Monitor, Forbes.