Saturday, December 19, 2015

This Year is the Hottest. Next Year's Hotter Still.

Okay, brace yourselves. This year is expected to be the warmest on record. That means this year will be warmer than last year. It's a record that's expected to last for - one year. Next year is expected to be warmer than this year when it becomes last year but it will still be warmer than the last year before it.

In other words, the three warmest years on record will be 2016 in first place, 2015, a respectable second, and 2014 holding down third spot. In case you're wondering, that's not a good thing. It's a bad thing.



2016 is set to be the warmest year ever recorded, according to a forecast issued by the UK Met Office on Thursday.

Climate change and the peaking of the El Niño weather phenomenon are expected to drive the global average temperature next year above the record now certain to be set for 2015, which itself beat a new record set in 2014.

The Met Office forecast indicates the global average temperature in 2016 will be 1.14C above pre-industrial temperatures, showing how challenging it will be to meet the 1.5C goal. The Met Office said there was just a 5% chance the global average temperature in 2016 would be below that in 2015.

“The vast majority of the warming is global warming, but the icing on the cake is the big El Niño event,” said Prof Adam Scaife, head of monthly to decadal prediction at the Met Office.

Rising temperatures driven by global warming combined with natural variability leads to a greater chance of extreme weather events, he said: “When variability adds to the underlying warming, it can give impacts that have never been seen before.”

Heatwaves have scorched China, Russia, Australia, the Middle East and parts of South America in the last two years. The recent floods in the northwest of England are estimated to have been made 40% more likely by climate change.


[Over the past decade] natural climate cycles led to more of the trapped heat being stored in the oceans. Now, according to the Met Office, all the signs are that the period of slower rises in air temperatures is over and the rate of global warming will accelerate fast in coming years. 2014 was the first year the world passed 1C of warming above pre-industrial levels.



5 comments:

Toby said...

We think 25,000 refugees are a problem. That's just a start. GM could put half a billion on the move.

chris said...

This is not a surprise but that chart certainly was. Took me a moment.

The Mound of Sound said...

A few months ago Lord Paddy Ashdown, former head of Britain's Liberal Democrats, warned that without immediate action on climate change Europe could expect a constant wave of mass migrations out of eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa that would utterly eclipse the Syrian migration.
I expect he's right.

The question then becomes whether the response to migrations will be political, humanitarian or military. Both the British MoD and the Pentagon have formulated migration responses and, as you might expect, they include some bloody murderous options.

It comes down to the "overloaded lifeboat" syndrome. Do you save the people in the boat by repelling swimmers in the water or do you sit by and allow the boat to be overwhelmed and swamped, killing everyone?

The Mound of Sound said...


Yes the charts are grim, Chris. For all the talk of El Nino it seems we might also be witnessing a flip in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation whereby heat stored in the deep ocean over the past fifteen plus years is discharged back into the atmosphere,compounding man-made global warming.

It's amazing how many people cannot grasp the law of conservation of energy. To them atmospheric heat transferred into the ocean is simply gone, never to return.

LeDaro said...

Mound, we are having erratic weather in the Maritimes.

It looks that melting ice and glaciers on the North pole are sending cold northern winds which is making weather colder here. We hardly had summer.

Some smart ones have concluded from this that we are headed for colder weather. They're unable to understand global weather.