Washington, Jan. 13 (BNA): The Earth will warm to the sixth hottest year on record in 2021, according to several newly released temperature measurements, an Associated Press report says.
Scientists say the exceptionally hot year is part of a long-term warming trend that is showing hints of an acceleration.
Two US science agencies — NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — and a private measurement group released their calculations of global temperatures for the past year on Thursday, and they all said they were not too far from sweltering 2016 and 2020.
Six different calculations found that 2021 was between the fifth and seventh hottest years since the late 19th century. NASA said 2021 tied 2018 as the sixth hottest year ever, while last year NOAA ranked sixth on its own.
Scientists say La Nina — the natural cooling of parts of the central Pacific that alters weather patterns globally and brings cold, deep ocean waters to the surface — lowered global temperatures just as the other side, El Nino, boosted them in 2016.
However, they said, 2021 was the hottest year on record in La Nina and that the year did not mark a lull in human-caused climate change, but provided more of the same heat.
“The long-term trend is very, very clear. And that’s because of us. And it’s not going away until we stop increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist who heads the temperature team at NASA.
NASA and NOAA data agree that the past eight years have been the eight highest ever. Their data shows that global temperatures, averaged over a 10-year period to exclude natural variance, are approximately 2 degrees (1.1 °C) warmer than they were 140 years ago.
Other 2021 measurements came from the Japan Meteorological Agency and satellite measurements by the Coronavirus Climate Change Service in Europe and the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
There was a distinct jump in temperatures about eight to 10 years ago, as scientists began studying whether the rise in temperatures was accelerating. Schmidt and Hausfather said early signs point to this but it’s hard to know for sure.
“If you just look at the past 10 years, how many are far above the trend line for the past 10 years? Schmidt said in an interview.
There is a 99% chance that 2022 will be among the 10 warmest years on record, with a 10% chance that it will be the hottest, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief of climate analysis, Russell Foz, said at a press conference Thursday. Absolutely.
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