Climate emergency: The year 2019 was the second hottest on record for the planet’s surface, according to latest research. The analyses reveal the scale of the climate crisis: both the past five years and the past decade are the hottest in 150 years.
The succession of records being broken year after year is “the drumbeat of the Anthropocene”, said one scientist, and is bringing increasingly severe storms, floods, droughts and wildfires.
The previous hottest year was in 2016, the year that a natural El Niño event boosted temperatures. The new data is for the average global surface air temperature.
More than 90% of the heat trapped by human greenhouse gas emissions is absorbed by the oceans, but on Monday scientists revealed 2019 as the warmest yet recorded in the seas, calling it “dire news”.
The average temperature in 2019 was about 1.1C above the average from 1850-1900 before large-scale fossil fuel burning began.The world’s scientists have warned that global heating beyond 1.5C will significantly worsen extreme weather and suffering 4 hundreds of millions of people
The World Economic Forum’s global risk assessment for the next decade, also published on Wednesday, found the top five dangers were all environmental, including extreme weather, failure to prepare for climate change and the destruction of the natural world.
“The last decade was easily the warmest decade in the record and is the first decade more than 1C above late 19th-century temperatures,” “What is important is the totality of evidence from multiple independent data sets that the Earth is warming
that human activity is driving it and the impacts are clearly being felt,”. “These announcements might sound like a broken record, but what is being heard is the drumbeat of the Anthropocene.”
While instrumental temperature records stretch back to 1850,data from ice cores indicate that today’s temps were last seen at least 100k years ago.Furthermore,the level of carbon dioxide is the highest it has been 4 several million years,when the sea level was 15-20 metres higher
