2019 Second Hottest Year Since Records Began, NOAA Says

The hottest half-decade on record has just passed, with 2019 fin­ish­ing as the sec­ond hottest year too, accord­ing to the 2019 global cli­mate report released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Record-high land tem­per­a­tures were recorded in Australia and New Zealand, parts of cen­tral Europe, Asia, south­ern Africa, North America and east­ern South America. Additionally, record-high ocean tem­per­a­tures were mea­sured in all four oceans.

According to data col­lected by NOAA, the aver­age tem­per­a­ture in 2019 was 0.95 °C (1.71 °F) above aver­age and 0.04 degrees Celsius (0.07 degrees Fahrenheit) less than the record set in 2016. 2016 was the hottest year since records began in 1880, with a tem­per­a­ture rise of 0.99 °C (1.78 °F) above-aver­age tem­per­a­tures.

“I would say, notwith­stand­ing some sort of major, major geo­phys­i­cal event, it would be almost cer­tain that the [com­ing] decade will be warmer than the pre­vi­ous,” Deke Arndt, head of the mon­i­tor­ing branch at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, told NPR.

Overall, land and ocean tem­per­a­tures have been above aver­age for the past 43 years and nine of the 10 warmest years on record have come since 2005.

“The fact is that the planet is warm­ing, and every year, we add one extra data point to this graph,” the direc­tor of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Gavin Schmidt, told NPR. “[However,] the main thing here is not really the rank­ing but is the con­sis­tency of the long-term trends that we’re see­ing.”

In a his­tor­i­cal con­text, 2019 global land and sea tem­per­a­tures were 1.15 °C (2.07 °F) above the aver­age of the 21-year span from 1880 to 1900 – which is often con­sid­ered a sur­ro­gate for pre-indus­trial con­di­tions.

Since 1981, one cen­tury after tem­per­a­tures began being recorded, the aver­age rate of tem­per­a­ture increase per decade has more than dou­bled, ris­ing from +0.07 °C (+0.13 °F) to +0.18 degrees (+0.32 °F).

In the past year, the global land sur­face tem­per­a­ture was 1.42 degrees Celsius (2.56 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 20^th cen­tury aver­age, tying with 2015 as the sec­ond high­est.

Meanwhile, the global sea sur­face tem­per­a­ture also came in sec­ond place in 2019 with a tem­per­a­ture that was 0.77 °C (1.39 °F) higher than the 20^th-cen­tury aver­age.

NOAA’s analy­sis of global tem­per­a­ture data for 2019 is in line with those mea­sured by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), NASA and Copernicus, the European Union’s Earth Observation Program, all of which con­cluded that 2019 was the sec­ond-hottest year on record.

“The warm­ing up until now since the 1970s has been quite close to lin­ear,” Schmidt said. ​“You’d imag­ine we’d cross 1.5 [degrees Celsius] in around 2035. But of course, that depends on what we do with emis­sions, and we’re not able to tell you look­ing at the past how soci­ety will react.”

Adopted in 2016, the Paris Agreement on cli­mate change has set the goal to limit the rise in global tem­per­a­tures to below 2 °C (3.6 °F) by 2030 and ide­ally to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F).

• NOAA


• NPR