“The 20 warmest years on record have been in the past 22 years. The degree of warming during the past four years has been exceptional, both on land and in the ocean.”
Current five-year stretch the warmest since records began
Global temperatures in 2018 were the fourth warmest on record, US government scientists have confirmed, adding to a stretch of five years that are now collectively the hottest period since modern measurements began.
The world in 2018 was 1.5F (0.83C) warmer than the average set between 1951 and 1980, said Nasa and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa). This means 2018’s average global temperatures were the fourth warmest since 1880, placing it behind 2016, 2017 and 2015.
This follows a broader pattern of human-induced climate change, which is boosting increasingly punishing heatwaves, sea level rises and extreme weather. Last year saw a pair of devastating hurricanes hit the eastern US, while record wildfires ravaged California.
There was disastrous flooding in India, a huge typhoon in the Philippines and deadly wildfires in Greece and Sweden. The Arctic, which had its second warmest year on record, experienced temperature highs that astonished scientists.
“2018 is yet again an extremely warm year on top of a long-term global warming trend,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
“The impacts of long-term global warming are already being felt – in coastal flooding, heatwaves, intense precipitation and ecosystem change.”
Schmidt said that 2018 was “quite clearly the fourth warmest year on record and it was probably warmer than many hundreds of years before that”.
He added he was “very concerned with what is going on in the Arctic”, which is heating up at around double the rate of the global average. Average extent of sea ice in the Arctic was the second smallest on record in 2018.
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| Do you see any signs of a "pause" in recent years? Me neither. Source: The Guardian |
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