2017 Was Second Warmest Year Since Records Were Kept And It Had No El Nino Effect


01/19/2018



2017 was the second warmest year for Earth ever since records had been kept according to multiple reports of environment and other agencies.
 
Ever since modern recordkeeping began in 1880, 2017 was adjudged to be the second warmest year according to the U.S. space agency NASA. On the other hand, 2017 was ranked to be the third warmest in history after a separate analysis conducted by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
 
Compared to the average global temperatures from 1951 till 1980, the average global temperature recorded in 2017 was 0.90 degrees Celsius higher, according to NASA.
 
And compared to the average temperature for the 20th Century, the global average temperature over land as well as sea in 2017 was 0.84 degrees Celsius according to scientists at NOAA. Records for global temperatures have been kept since 1880 and only 2015 and 2016 were warmer years to 2017 in that entire period till date. 
 
And compared to the pre-industrial era, the global average surface temperature was about 1.1 degrees Celsius higher in 2017, claimed an analysis from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The agency also ranked 2017 among the top three warmest years ever.
 
"The annual change from year to year can bounce up and down, there is year to year variability, but the long term trends are very clear, especially since the mid-21th century," Deke Arndt, chief of the global monitoring branch of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, told reporters during a media teleconference.
 
"The overall picture is very, very similar and coherent," echoed Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies during the same teleconference. "We are in a long-term warming trend."
 
Both NASA and NOAA said that since 2010, Earth has witnessed the five most war years ever.
 
There are short term variations in the global average temperature due to factors like the El Nino and La Nina. These phenomenon raises or brings down the temperatures in the upper tropical Pacific Ocean resulting in change sin in global wind and weather patterns.
 
During the entire of 2015 and one third of 2016, global temperatures were of affected by a warming El Nino event. But the high temperatures of 2017 were without any impact from El Nino and La Nina had set only in the later part of the year, according to NASA. 
 
Both NOAA and NASA claimed that El Nino had no impact on the global temperatures in 2017 while the phenomena had resulted in an increase of 0.04 degrees Celsius in 2015, and 0.12 degrees Celsius in 2016 in the annual average temperature.
 
If "the effects of the recent El Nino and La Nina patterns were statistically removed from the record, 2017 would have been the warmest year on record," they said.
 
The revelation that 2017 was amongst the warmest years with an El Nino effect was described as "unsurprising but deeply concerning" by Martin Siegert, co-director of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London.
 
"Despite our best efforts so far, global warming continues apace," Siegert said. "Forget what the sceptics will tell you, climate change is real and is happening right now ... This is yet another wake-up call -- to develop a zero carbon sustainable economy before it's too late."
 
(Source:www.xinhuanet.com)