Here is the Wall Street Journal version, if you prefer that to the NYT:
Last Year Was Warmest on Record, Climate Experts Say Temperatures in 2016 set record for third year in a row, NASA and NOAA researchers find
By
Robert Lee Hotz
Updated Jan. 18, 2017 1:50 p.m. ET
590 COMMENTS
Rising global temperatures in 2016 set a record for the third year in a row, as federal climate experts rated it the warmest year world-wide since modern record keeping began.
In a new federal climate report, researchers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which independently track annual climate trends for the federal government, said Wednesday that global land and sea surface temperatures were boosted by a powerful El Niño current in the Pacific and by rising concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
During 2016, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.69°F (0.94°C) above the 20th-century average, the scientists said. This was the highest among the 137 years since records began in 1880.
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The new report echoes three other independent assessments of the year’s global warming trend.
The Japan Meteorological Agency, which uses slightly different methods in its calculations, last month also ranked 2016 as the warmest in its modern record. This month, researchers at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who use satellite data to track global atmospheric temperatures, concluded that by a very small statistical margin, 2016 was the warmest year in 38 years of orbital monitoring.
And on Wednesday, scientists at the U.K.’s Met Office Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit reported that by their analysis 2016 was fractionally warmer than any other year in its record keeping, barely edging out 2015.
“These data sets are all singing the same song, even though the notes are slightly different,” said Deke Arndt, chief of the global monitoring branch at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, Asheville, N.C. “These methods all have their strengths and weakness, but are capturing the same signal in the long term.”
Some researchers have argued that the rise in global temperatures peaked during the very strong El Niño year of 1998 and has stalled since. NOAA scientists and other research groups, however, re-examined the data and reported in several studies over the past two years that the apparent slowdown was due to measurement errors that, when corrected, show that global temperatures have risen steadily.
All told, the World Meteorological Organization says that 16 of the 17 hottest years on record have occurred in this century.
In the 48 states of the continental U.S., 2016 was the second-hottest year in record keeping, marking 20 years in a row when temperatures were above average, according to scientists from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.
Now that the El Niño phenomenon has waned, many experts say they expect that global temperatures in 2017 will be lower.
wsj.com |
