Wednesday January 15th… Dear Diary. The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track United States extreme or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
Main Topic: NASA and NOAA Declare 2019 as 2nd Warmest Globally…Where Do We Go From Here?
Dear Diary. Today, as expected, we learned that both NOAA and NASA have declared that 2019 was 2nd warmest only below that of 2016, which was affected by a strong El Nino. The Earth definitely has a fever. Here are some particulars:
First, from NOAA:
- 2019 marks the 43rd consecutive year (since 1977) with global land and ocean temperatures, at least nominally, above the 20th century average.
- The five warmest years have occurred since 2015; nine of the 10 warmest years have occurred since 2005. The year 1998 is the only 20th century year among the 10 warmest years on record.
- The annual global land and ocean temperature has increased at an average rate of +0.13°F (+0.07°C) per decade since 1880; however, since 1981 the average rate of increase is more than twice that rate (+0.32°F / +0.18°C).
- For the 21-year span that is considered a reasonable surrogate for pre-industrial conditions (1880–1900), the 2019 global land and ocean temperature was 2.07°F (1.15°C) above the average.
The 2010s were a slam dunk for being the warmest decade on record:
Why are all these stats important? Because the end result of warming, even just around +1.0°C above preindustrial conditions, has led to much suffering around the planet…just ask Australian’s, for example. Let’s blow up the NOAA chart displaying significant weather and climate events from 2019:
The only large area to have any significant cold weather producing damage with associated spring flooding from snow melt was North America from early 2019. As depicted there were numerous heat waves and tropical cyclones. Our climate is sick, but it’s not too late for the healing process to start:
So what will 2020 bring? The carnage wrought by a record hot December 2019 in Australia continues into 2020, which does not bode well, for example. I’ll add a forecast via renowned NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt once I see that for 2020. As noted yesterday perhaps volcanic activity can give us a little reprieve from our global fever later this year. We will see if Dr. Schmidt takes this into account.
Here is more climate and weather news from Tuesday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article.)
(If you like these posts and my work please contribute via the PayPal widget, which has recently been added to this site. Thanks in advance for any support.)
Guy Walton “The Climate Guy”