The Earth is losing its coolness as climate change becomes the biggest destabilizing factor across the world. According to the latest assessment by scientists at the American space agency, NASA, the planet has warmed up by about 1.1 degrees Celsius since the early 1900s. In a new visualization, scientists have shown how in the last two centuries the world has been hit by global warming, which increased drastically in the final years of the 20th century and continued unabated in the 21st century.
Despite a La Nina, a cooling of the equatorial Pacific that slightly reduces global average temperatures, NASA recently announced that 2022 was the fifth warmest year on record. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration calculates 2022’s global average temperature was 14.76 degrees Celsius, ranking the sixth hottest on record. It did not include the polar regions.
Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit group of independent scientists, said it was the fifth warmest on record and noted that for 28 countries it was the hottest year on record, including China, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Germany, and New Zealand. The past nine years have been the warmest years since modern recordkeeping began in 1880. This means Earth in 2022 was about 1.11 degrees Celsius warmer than the late 19th-century average.
Meanwhile, the Arctic region continues to experience the strongest warming trends – close to four times the global average – according to research presented at the 2022 annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
Researchers are concerned that with La Nina likely dissipating and a possible El Nino on the way, 2023 will likely be warmer than 2022. The last year that the Earth was cooler than the 20th-century average was 1976, according to NOAA.
Scientists say that average temperatures aren’t what really affects people, it’s how the warming makes extreme weather events such as heatwaves, floods, droughts, and storms worse or more frequent or both. In 2022, the world saw some of the worst extreme weather events in recent history with wildfires, droughts, incessant rains, snowstorms, and blizzards hitting almost every country.
Researchers maintain that the reason for the warming trend is that human activities continue to pump enormous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the long-term planetary impacts will also continue. The Earth’s temperature is rising and it’s crucial that we take immediate action to reduce our carbon.