While last year was the fourth-warmest year on record, British meteorologists are predicting the next five years would be much hotter, maybe even record-breaking.
Two US agencies, the UK Met Office and the World Meteorological Organization analyzed global temperatures in slightly different ways, but each came to the same conclusion on Wednesday: Last year was the fourth-warmest year on record behind 2016, 2015 and 2017.
The US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said that last year’s average temperature was 14.69°C, which is 0.79°C warmer than the 20th-century average.
Photo: AP
Much of Europe had its warmest years on record. Records go back to 1880.
NASA and NOAA climate scientists said that even though last year was a tad cooler than the three previous years, that was mostly due to random weather variations.
“Never mind the little wiggles from year to year. The trend is going relentlessly up, and it will continue to do so,” Potsdam Institute climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf said in an e-mail. “Those who live in denial of this fact are in denial of physics.”
Using computer simulations, the British weather office forecast that the next five years would average somewhere between 14.73°C to 15.27°C. That would be warmer than the past four years.
Outside scientists, such as Natalie Mahowald of Cornell University, said that the forecast was consistent with what researchers know about warming and natural variability.
The obvious long-term trend of steady warming makes it easier to more accurately predict near future warming, NASA chief climate scientist Gavin Schmidt said.
The US temperature last year was the 14th-warmest on average, NOAA climate monitoring chief Deke Arndt said.
Last year was also the third wettest on record in the US.
Nine eastern states had their wettest years on record, “an exclamation point on a trend of big rain” in the age of climate change, Arndt said.
There were 14 weather and climate disasters that cost more than US$1 billion, for a total of US$91 billion, Arndt said.
At least 247 people died in those disasters. That was the fourth-highest number of billion-dollar disasters and the fourth-highest dollar amount, taking inflation into account.
The damage included Hurricane Michael’s US$25 billion tally and US$24 billion each from Hurricane Florence and the western wildfires.
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