Despite commendable caution from the Met Office, the evidence is very strong that 2014 really was the Earth’s hottest year since records began.
The Met Office has announced that 2014 may have been the hottest on record.
It comes after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA both announced that 2014 definitely was the hottest year.
Getty Images/iStockphoto emarto
The data show that 2014 was 0.56°C (give or take 0.1°C) above the average global temperature. That makes it the hottest year ever, tied with 2010. But the Met Office only said it's "one of" the warmest years – "We can say with confidence that 2014 is one of 10 warmest years in the series" going back to 1850, said Colin Morice, a climate monitoring scientist at the Met Office.
It's because the uncertainty range is greater than the difference between the hottest years.
It's hard to say that any given year is the hottest, because the "give or take 0.1°C" mentioned above is enough to make it uncertain. The Met Office is being cautious because one of the other, almost-as-hot years, could in fact have been the hottest. "Uncertainties in the estimates of global temperature are larger than the differences between the warmest years," says Morice.
NOAA / Via ncdc.noaa.gov
"It's fairly clear that 2014 was the hottest," said Mark Lynas, the author of Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet , because all three datasets released in the last few weeks – NASA's, the NOAA's, and the Met Office's – agree. Often in the past there have been slight discrepancies.
Lynas thinks the Met Office's caution is in part due to "blowback" from climate sceptics: After the NOAA released its data, there was criticism that it hadn't taken this sort of uncertainty into account.
via on BuzzFeed
0 comments:
Post a Comment