2 agencies declare 2016 hottest year on record

Trump has called climate change a hoax

In a powerful testament to the warming of the planet, two leading U.S. science agencies Wednesday jointly declared 2016 the hottest year on record, surpassing the previous record set last year — which itself had topped a mark set in 2014.

The pronouncement comes two days before President-elect Donald Trump, who has tweeted that global warming is a hoax, takes office after a campaign in which he threatened to pull the nation out of an international agreement to fight climate change.

Trump has since said he has an open mind about the Paris climate accord, even as he has nominated to various Cabinet posts a slate of men who have raised questions about the extent to which human activity is responsible for rising temperatures around the world.

Scientists have been far less guarded, noting the striking reality that global temperatures have set a record three years in a row.

“We don’t expect record years every year, but the ongoing longterm warming trend is clear,” said Gavin Schmidt, who directs NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, in a statement accompanying the government temperature report.

NASA announced the record jointly with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Last year’s warmth was manifested across the planet, from the warm tropical ocean waters off the coast of northeastern Australia that contribute to the widespread death of coral in the Great Barrier Reef, to the Arctic, where melting sea ice hit regular monthly record lows and overall temperatures were the highest on record, at least from January through September of 2016.

In a catalogue of some of the extremes the planet witnessed during the year, the NOAA noted the megafire that engulfed Fort McMurray, in Alberta, Canada, at the beginning of May, a conflagration that came relatively early in the year for wildfires. That event was certainly consistent with a warming climate, as well as with the role of El Niño, although scientists are reluctant to formally say that climate change has played a role in an individual event without conducting extensive analysis.

Extreme high temperatures were seen from India — where the city of Phalodi recorded temperatures of 123.8 Fahrenheit in May, a new national record — to Iran, where a temperature 127.4 Fahrenheit was recorded in Delhoran on July 22.

For the contiguous United States, 2016 was merely the second warmest year on record, but for Alaska, it was the warmest yet recorded, underscoring once again the sharpness of Arctic warmth, in particular.

Last year’s warmth was partly enhanced by a strong weather pattern known as El Niño, triggered by unusually warm waters in the Pacific. But the scientists underscore that the event is hardly the only cause. For example, 1998 was also, at the time, the warmest year on record, thanks in part to a strong El Niño — but the 2016 planetary temperature now far surpasses that year, meaning other factors probably contributed to the temperature’s rise.