NOAA and NASA: 2015 was the hottest year on record

“2015 was the warmest year in more than a hundred years, ever since people have been keeping records and actually it beat the old record not by a little bit, but by a lot”, said Professor Timothy Herbert, Chair of the Geological Sciences Department at Brown University in Providence. But the amount by which 2015 shattered the previous record, in 2014, was itself a record, scientists said.

NOAA said 2015’s temperature was 58.62 degrees Fahrenheit, or 14.79 degrees Celsius, passing 2014 by 0.29 degrees and 1.62 degrees above the 20th-century average. In 2014, global temperatures were 0.13 Celsius warmer, leaving a huge margin between 2014 and 2015 temperatures.

In a statement, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said that climate change is a great problem in today’s world and the agency plays an important task on this matter.

While an unusually strong El Niño weather pattern provided a modest boost to global temperatures, global climate change is considered a larger driver of the warming. NOAA put the number at above 99 percent – or “virtually certain”, said Tom Karl, director of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

The Northern Hemisphere saw the biggest rise in land temperatures, finishing 2.59° F hotter than the 20th century average.

Gavin Schmidt of NASA called 2015 “very, very clearly the warmest year by a long chalk”.

While the trend toward global warming has been accepted by the majority of scientists for some time, it seemed to slow somewhat near the end of the 20th century, leading some to suspect a “pause” in climate change was occurring.

Temperature records were first taken in 1880.

Record warmth was broadly spread around the world, NOAA reported, with portions of central and South America, Europe, and central Asia seeing some of the warmest temperatures. NASA began studying global warming in 1988, which at the time was a record year for high temperatures.

The new numbers confirm long-term warming trends predicted by scientists, and were nearly certainly caused in part by human activities, researchers said.

“We would likely have had a record without El Nino, but El Nino pushed it way over the top”, he said.

2015 was a record-shattering year in many ways, one of which is the year’s jarring temperature as the hottest 365 days in historical record.