“It’s certainly warmer now than at any time in the past 2,000 years, and probably longer.”Įarlier this week, the European climate agency Copernicus said 2021 was the fifth hottest year on record, with the last seven years the hottest ever documented. “It’s clear that each of the past four decades has been warmer than the one preceding it,” he added. NOAA and NASA undertake their own temperature analyses in slightly different ways, using data from weather stations, ships and ocean buoys. “It doesn’t matter how you do the analysis, it shows you the Earth has warmed quite dramatically,” said Vose.
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now at levels not seen on Earth in the past 4m years. While 2021 did not top the record heat set in 2020, which was only fractionally hotter than 2016, scientists said last year was yet another demonstration of the long-term global heating that is being caused by human activity, such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation. “No one lives at the global average temperature…Most land areas will experience more warming than the global average.” “What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic,” he said. Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said the changes under way in the Arctic, which is warming at about three times the rate of the global average, are “extremely dramatic” and will affect the rest of the world through, among other things, sea-level rise from melting glaciers. “If it weren’t for the large heat storage capacity of the oceans, the atmosphere would’ve warmed a lot more rapidly.” “The oceans are storing a heck of a lot of heat,” said Russell Vose, a senior climate scientist at NOAA. There were record-high temperatures in parts of northern Africa, south Asia and parts of South America last year, Arctic sea ice continued its decline and the oceans recorded yet another record year for heat content. Nelson said that eight out of the top 10 hottest years have occurred in the past decade, which “underscores the need for bold action to safeguard the future of our country-and all of humanity.” “Science leaves no room for doubt: climate change is the existential threat of our time,” said Bill Nelson, administrator of NASA. Last year was the sixth hottest ever recorded, with the global temperature 1.1 C above the pre-industrial average, a new annual analysis from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found. This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
0 kommentar(er)
