NASA: 2020 tied for hottest year

Houston saw a persistent hurricane threat, which is worsened by a changing climate

A year hated for bringing the world the coronavirus pandemic will now also go down as one of the warmest in recorded history so far.

NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, have announced new research analyzing the Earth’s surface temperature in 2020.

Researchers at NASA found last year’s average global temperature effectively tied with 2016 for warmest on record.

Those at NOAA determined that 2020’s average temperature ranked second behind 2016.

The two agencies used different methodologies, according to a news release. NASA inferred temperatures in polar regions; NOAA did not. But their results varied only slightly.

Long-term trends were more important than what happened in any one year, Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in a statement.

And the trend is the Earth is warming: The last seven years

were the hottest on record.

“With these trends, and as the human impact on the climate increases, we have to expect that records will continue to be broken,” Schmidt said.

Location to location, temperature change differs, too, explained Tom Neumann, chief of NASA’s Cryospheric Sciences Lab. The global average shows the clear warming trend overall.

“Largely responsible” for this warming are man-made greenhouse gas emissions, NASA says. These are created by people burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas.

In the world’s so-called energy capital, Houstonians last year faced a persistent threat of hurricanes.

It was a threat worsened by climate change. A warming Earth, and warming ocean, make stronger hurricanes more likely.

Hurricane Laura exemplified that danger, making landfall as a Category 4 storm and battering Louisiana and East Texas last year.

Melting ice is adding to sea level rise, and heat also causes the volume of water to expand, making for higher tides and storm surges that reach farther inland than they would have before.

“They’re not hypothetical changes anymore,” Neumann said in an interview. “These are things that are happening.”

Godofredo A. Vásquez / Staff file photo A man pushes his bicycle Aug. 27 near a store in Lake Charles, La., damaged during Hurricane Laura, which also struck East Texas. Stronger hurricanes are expected to become more common as Earth warms. Laura made landfall as a Category 4 storm.