A mural of George Floyd is shown in the intersection of 38th St & Chicago Ave on March 31, 2021 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Community members continue preparations during the third day in the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who is charged with multiple counts of murder in the death of George Floyd. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images) WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 01: President Donald Trump's lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani talks to journalists outside the White House West Wing July 01, 2020 in Washington, DC. Giuliani did an on-camera interview with One America News Network's Chanel Rion before talking to other journalists about Vice President Joe Biden and the news that Russian intelligence may have paid Taliban operatives to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) ORLANDO, FLORIDA - FEBRUARY 28: Former President Donald Trump addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference held in the Hyatt Regency on February 28, 2021 in Orlando, Florida. Begun in 1974, CPAC brings together conservative organizations, activists, and world leaders to discuss issues important to them. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) Here's what reported grand jury in Trump case may look like NEW YORK, NY - FEBRUARY 09: People walk past the Trump Tower as the impeachment trial of Donald Trump begins in Washington on February 09, 2021 in New York City. After listening to nearly four hours of legal arguments, the Senate has voted on Tuesday to move ahead with the impeachment trial of former President Trump. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) Report: US companies may have benefited from forced labor of Uyghurs WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 20: U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the conflict in the Middle East from Cross- Hall of the White House on May 20, 2021 in Washington, DC. Israel and Hamas announced that they would agree to a cease-fire, which will take into effect on Friday, following days of fighting that claimed more than 200 lives. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images) SAN JOSE, CA - MAY 26: A view of the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) light-rail yard where a mass shooting occurred on May 26, 2021 in San Jose, California. A VTA employee opened fire at the yard, with preliminary reports indicating nine people dead including the gunman. (Photo by Philip Pacheco/Getty Images) A healthcare worker prepares to administer a Pfizer/BioNTEch coronavirus disease (Covid-19) vaccine at The Michener Institute, in Toronto, Ontario on December 14, 2020. - Ontario, Canada's most populous province and one of the hardest hit by the pandemic, had 1,940 new cases and 23 deaths on Monday. The province is expected to give its next doses to nursing home workers as a priority, according to media reports. (Photo by CARLOS OSORIO / POOL / AFP) (Photo by CARLOS OSORIO/POOL/AFP via Getty Images) 'Never seen levels like this': Union president on airline passenger misconduct Memorial Day weekend will bring rain and cool air for much of the East SANTA CRUZ PROVINCE, ARGENTINA - NOVEMBER 27: Ice calves at the Perito Moreno glacier in Los Glaciares National Park, part of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the third largest ice field in the world, on November 27, 2015 in Santa Cruz Province, Argentina. The majority of the almost 50 large glaciers in Los Glacieres National Park have been retreating during the past fifty years due to warming temperatures, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). The United States Geological Survey (USGS) reports that over 68 percent of the world's freshwater supplies are locked in ice caps and glaciers. The United Nations climate change conference begins November 30 in Paris. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images) (CNN) — Last year was the fourth-hottest year ever recorded, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, which means that the past five years have been the five warmest years in the modern record. NOAA and NASA discussed 2018’s global temperature and climate in a joint news conference Wednesday; both agencies maintain independent data that goes back to 1880 to monitor temperatures around the globe. The announcement was delayed several weeks due to the government shutdown that resulted in many NOAA and NASA employees being furloughed. If it seems like you’ve heard this before, you have: Eighteen of the hottest 19 years have occurred since 2001. Global average temperature anomaly for 2018, from NOAA. Warmer colors indicate temperatures above average, while cooler colors indicate below average temperatures. “2018 is yet again an extremely warm year on top of a long-term global warming trend,” according to Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The average global temperature has risen about 2 degrees Fahrenheit, or a little over 1 degree Celsius, since the 1880s. That puts us more than two-thirds of the way to the warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius that was set in the Paris climate agreement. “This warming has been driven in large part by increased emissions into the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases caused by human activities,” Schmidt said. Record warmth was seen over much of Europe for 2018, which saw summer temperatures well over 90 degrees Fahrenheit – over 32 degrees Celsius – all the way up to the Arctic Circle. Record warmth extended along the Mediterranean and the Middle East, as well. Polar regions feeling the heat Temperatures continue to warm fastest in the polar regions, where alarming melting of ice was once again observed in 2018. Annual sea ice extent in both the Arctic and the Antarctic regions in 2018 was the second smallest on record; both poles came in just behind 2017, which was the record smallest since satellite observations of the region began in 1979. Last year also saw the melting of what is believed to be some of the oldest ice in the Arctic, north of Greenland – which scientists believed would be the “last bastion” to be melted by climate change. In addition to the loss of sea ice, ice continues to melt from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, according to Schmidt. Loss of ice mass from these important ice caps contributes significantly to sea level rise. Wettest year in 35 years for the United States Many locations around the planet endured extreme weather and climate events in 2018, but the United States was hit particularly hard. The contiguous US average rainfall of 34.63 inches made 2018 the wettest year in 35 years and the third-wettest year since records began in 1895. Extremely heavy rainfall events such as Hurricane Florence and the flash floods in Ellicott City, Maryland, stand out as examples of extreme precipitation that are consequences of a warmer climate. Warmer air can hold more moisture, making more available during storms. Nine states in the eastern United States had their wettest years on record: Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia. There were 14 separate weather and climate disasters that each exceeded $1 billion in damage last year. In total, the events cost $91 billion, according to NOAA estimates, of which $73 billion came in three major events: Hurricanes Michael ($25 billion) and Florence ($24 billion) and the Western wildfires, which included the Carr and Camp fires in California ($24 billion). The past three years have set records for billion-dollar disasters striking the United States, with 45 separate events. The long-term, inflation-adjusted average is 6.2 events per year, so the United States has nearly tripled that pace since 2016. “This has been a historic period of weather and climate extremes,” said Adam Smith, lead researcher at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. “Not only have many of these events rewritten the record books, but nearly all regions of the US were impacted in some way.”<doc-sep>Five different organizations that track temperatures have all come to this conclusion: 2018 ranked among the five warmest years on record, landing in fourth place. All of them - NOAA, NASA, Berkeley Earth, the United Kingdom's Hadley Centre and the Japan Meteorological Agency - crunched the numbers using different methods, but they each arrived at the same answer. Confidence in this ranking is, thus, very high. The past five years have each now ranked among the five warmest on record. According to NASA, 18 of the 19 warmest years have occurred since 2000. The warming of the planet is unambiguous and irrefutable. 1) Temperature differences from normal around the globe averaged over the last five years (NASA) If the top image doesn't make this clear, which shows the temperature differences from normal averaged over the last five years, here are four more... 2) A mountain of warming evidence Annual global temperature difference from average, 1880 to 2018. (NASA) This chart from NASA shows the temperature difference from normal, year by year. And the tendency is for years to keep climbing higher and higher. Here's a similar presentation from the U.K. Hadley Centre: 2018 to be nominally the 4th warmest year on record globally, at 0.91±0.1°C above the long-term pre-industrial average. This means that the last four years have been the warmest on record. https://t.co/kYXYmq98qv pic.twitter.com/tpozlvmok7 — Met Office (@metoffice) February 6, 2019 3) Five data sets, the same signal Global temperature difference from average, 1880 to 2018, from 5 different institutions. (NASA) The five research institutions mentioned earlier analyze land and ocean temperatures from all over the planet. While they use different techniques for processing the data, the resulting trends hardly differ. All of them show roughly the same, unmistakable warming signal. "Though there are minor variations from year to year, all five temperature records show peaks and valleys in sync with each other," NASA's Earth Observatory reports. "All show rapid warming in the past few decades, and all show the past decade has been the warmest." 4) 42 straight years of above-average global temperatures Annual global temperature difference from long-term average, 1880 to 2018. (NOAA) According to NOAA's analysis, 2018 marked the 42nd year in a row of temperatures warmer than the 20th-century average - dating back to 1977. "Nine of the 10 warmest years have occurred since 2005, with the last five years comprising the five hottest," it noted. 5) Red is overwhelming blue The past 5 years have been the warmest such period on record since at last 1880, NASA&NOAA have found. 2018 ranks as world's 4th warmest year, with 9/10 warmest years occurring since 2005. https://t.co/oX5UUtDG9s pic.twitter.com/liW55pUbCJ — Andrew Freedman (@afreedma) February 6, 2019 Axios created the above visual, which shows temperature differences from average around the globe during the periods centered on the 1940s and more recent decades. The contrast is stark and startling. 2018 © The Washington Post This article was originally published by The Washington Post.<doc-sep>
It's official: 2018 was the fourth hottest year on record, scientists at NASA and NOAA confirmed in a report released today (Feb. 6). The report is the latest installment of a yearly analysis that compares the two agencies' independent global temperature measurements with historical data. Both of those agencies' datasets are produced purely from observations gathered at ground stations around the world. But satellites play an important role in validating that data, offering additional information about climate and helping the agencies track climate processes. All the data points to one conclusion: 2018 was hotter than every single year between 1880 and 2014; only the three prior years were warmer than last year. "Across the globe, 2018 was extremely warm, with only a few places that were below our normal period [which runs from 1951 to 1980]," Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist and director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said during a news conference held to announce the report. NOAA's separate analysis confirmed the fourth-place finish. [NASA's Best Earth-from-Space Photos by Astronauts in 2017 (Gallery)] It isn't unusual to see annual changes that seem to buck the overall warming pattern, like the apparent cooling on display between 2016 and 2018. "You do tend to see some bouncing up and down superimposed upon a long-term trend," Deke Arndt, who leads global monitoring at NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, said during the news conference. "The global temperature series when presented in this way very much resembles riding up an escalator over time, and then jumping up and down while you're on that escalator." A still image pauses the onslaught of warmer temperatures in NASA and NOAA data summarizing global climate changes. (Image credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center) Both of the new analyses are based exclusively on data gathered from ground stations because that gives scientists a longer continuous series of matching measurements — back to 1880, long before humans had satellites studying climate as well. Comparing ground-based and satellite data faces the proverbial apples-to-oranges challenge. But those satellites are still crucially important to studying climate. In the case of the new analyses, scientists cross-referenced them with data gathered by an instrument called Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) on NASA's Aqua satellite, which has been orbiting Earth since 2002. That comparison supported the main finding of the analyses, but added an extra note of concern about warming in the Arctic. "The trends in the patterns are very congruent, but with an indication that the Arctic is warming more in the satellite trends than we are capturing in the station-based analyses," Schmidt said. "That's obviously something that scientifically we're going to be looking into going forward." Aqua is one of a fleet of climate satellites nicknamed the A-Train, which are studying a range of climate variables: not just temperature, but also factors like humidity and cloudiness. That data is crucial for rounding out the climate picture, according to Schmidt. "Without that, we would really be flying blind," he said. Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us @Spacedotcom and Facebook. Original article on Space.com.