Congratulations, 2019 was the second hottest year on record
UPDATE: Jan. 15, 2020, 11:57 a.m. EST: Both NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed 2019 was the second warmest year in 140 years of reliable record-keeping. Only 2016 was warmer.
The agencies also confirmed that the ocean continued to warm, Arctic sea ice continued to decline, Alaska had its warmest year on record, and the U.S. added to its troubling trend of increasing billion-dollar natural disasters (there were 14 in 2019).
Shocking nobody, 2019 was officially the second warmest year ever recorded.
You May Also Like
The European Union's earth observing agency, Copernicus, announced the warming record Wednesday morning, along with the fact that December 2019 tied 2015 for the warmest December in recorded history.
That means 19 of the last 20 years are now the warmest on record.
This makes sense. Earth's atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide — a potent heat-trapping gas — are the highest they've been in at least 800,00 years, but more likely millions of years. The pace at which these CO2 levels are rising are breaking records, too. Paleoclimatologists have found that carbon dioxide concentrations are increasing at rates that are unprecedented in both the historic and geologic record.
In 2019, all-time high-temperature records were smashed or broken all over the planet, in the likes of Alaska, Australia, Vietnam, France, Germany, and beyond.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
A common climate science denialist argument — though willfully ignorant and increasingly pathetic — is that cold or low records were also broken in 2019. Yes, that's true; winter still arrives and daily weather will always fluctuate. But the critical point is high temperature records are crushing low temperatures records.
As of mid-December, 364 all-time high temperatures were set in 2019, versus just 70 all-time lows. This makes sense.
"As the climate changes into a warmer climate we do expect to see more extreme warm temperatures," Ahira Sánchez-Lugo, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climatologist, told Mashable in December. "That’s what we’re seeing, and that’s what the data are showing."
By July, it was already clear 2019 would be one of the warmest years on record, as the first half of the year was the second-warmest half-year on record.
"As we have shown in recent work, the record warm streaks we’ve seen in recent years simply cannot be explained without accounting for the profound impact we are having on the planet through the burning of fossil fuels and the resulting increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations," climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, told Mashable in July.
Soon after, July officially became the warmest month ever recorded on Earth — in 140 years of reliable record-keeping.
The well-predicted consequences of heating the planet are playing out around the globe:
Unprecedented fires are burning in Australia. Greenland is melting at unprecedented rates. Ocean temperatures are relentlessly rising. Warming climes have doubled the amount of land burned by wildfires in the U.S. over the last 30 years.
Mark was the science editor at Mashable. After working as a ranger with the National Park Service, he started a reporting career after seeing the extraordinary value in educating people about the happenings on Earth, and beyond.
He's descended 2,500 feet into the ocean depths in search of the sixgill shark, ventured into the halls of top R&D laboratories, and interviewed some of the most fascinating scientists in the world.
