It’s Official: 2015 Was Hottest Year on Record

Glob­al tem­per­at­ures in 2015 were the warmest since re­cord-keep­ing began—and it wasn’t even close. Ac­cord­ing to new data from the Na­tion­al Ocean­ic and At­mo­spher­ic Ad­min­is­tra­tion and NASA, av­er­age tem­per­at­ures over land and ocean were 1.62 de­grees Fahren­heit (or 0.9 de­grees Celsi­us) above the 20th-cen­tury av­er­age, clear­ing the pre­vi­ous re­cord by 0.29 de­grees Fahren­heit. That’s the largest mar­gin by which any an­nu­al tem­per­at­ure re­cord has been broken. In 2015, 10 months set re­cord high tem­per­at­ures, in­clud­ing Decem­ber, and the five highest mar­gins of heat for any month all oc­curred in 2015, ac­cord­ing to NOAA’s data. It fol­lows an alarm­ing trend. Sci­ent­ists said last year that 2014 was the hot­test year on re­cord, and now nine of the 10 hot­test years on re­cord have oc­curred since 2000 (1998 is the sole ex­cep­tion). Six­teen of the last 18 years have been warm­er than 1997, which at the time was the hot­test on re­cord, and the Earth has set four an­nu­al heat re­cords in the last 11 years...more