Was the Hottest Year on Record by a Huge Margin

The year 2015 ranked the hottest on record by a huge margin, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Wednesday – nearly a year after the Oklahoma Republican and Environment and Public Works chairman hefted snow on the Senate floor as supposed evidence against global warming.

This is the largest margin by which the annual global temperature record has been broken. With El Niño continuing this year, and a lack of substantial reductions in greenhouse emissions, it looks likely that 2016 will set a new record. Last year, 2014 broke the global temperature record with an average temperature that was 0.78 degrees C (1.4 degrees F) above the average for all of the 20th century.

2015 was 0.29 Farenheit (0.13 Celsius) warmer than 2014, the report said.

Government record keepers said temperatures above both the Earth’s land and sea masses were the highest ever recorded and substantially above the 20th century averages.

U.S. scientists said record breaking heat previous year was only partially attributable to El Nino, a periodic weather cycle in the Pacific. “And it’s going to be very hard for that not to continue into at least the first part of next year because, in particular, the ocean temperatures are so warm”, Thomas Karl, director of the NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, told the BBC.

He said 2015 put a punctuation mark on a period of time during which the rate of warming appeared to slow.

In the United States, some Republican lawmakers and those skeptical of human-caused climate change have pointed to a slowdown in temperature rise after the powerful El Nino in 1998 as a sign that climate change is not a serious problem.

“Even coming off of 2014 being the hottest year, it was apparent early on that 2015 would be even hotter”, said Dave Rood, professor of climate and space sciences and engineering.

“What we will see is more and clearer impacts as we warm”, said Schmidt.

NOAA’s announcement came against the backdrop of the recently completed Paris climate talks, at which the goal of capping global warming at 2 deg C above pre-industrial levels was enshrined.

“2015 was remarkable even in the context of the ongoing El Niño”. This is the highest in the 136 years of record keeping.

The agency reported, “The previous year with a below-average temperature was 1996”.