News Worsens on Climate Change

摘要

The predictions and data on human-caused climate change continue on a downward slide. 2014 was the hottest year on record, and just in case you might think this was an outlier, 10 of the hottest years have occurred since the turn of the century. Skeptics can no longer point to 1998, a very hot year, and say that the climate has gotten cooler since. NOAA and NASA, which made the joint announcement of the record-breaker, released a chart showing that since records began around 1880, global warming has advanced in a stair-stepping manner, with global average temperatures up 1 degree Celsius over that period. The Japan Meteorological Agency also calculated that 2014 was the hottest year since it began keeping records. Importantly, this was not an El Nino year, although the record heat was more a product of an increasingly hot ocean than the surface temperature of the Earth's landmass, which did not get hotter in last year's measurements.