After continuous months of breaking warm temperature records – 2016 has been officially declared as one of the hottest years ever. This is the third consecutive year that broke global temperature records. This is another hopeless alarm raised by the scientists blaming the human activities that is the driving force behind climate change of such levels.
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US Met Office, along with NASA and NOAA have released their data separately but all point to one same thing: rise in temperatures were off the charts in 2016. Scientists have indicated that such high temperatures were last observed around 115000 years ago. Direct temperature measurements dates back to 1880. Scientists even believe that the planet Earth has not experienced such high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for 4 million years.
The average surface temperature of Earth was 0.94°C (1.69°F) above the 20th century average. The global ocean surface temperatures broke previous records by 0.01°C whereas global land surface temperatures rose by 0.10°C.
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The rise in global temperatures was aided by the natural phenomenon called El Niño. During El Niño ocean surface temperatures rise abnormally. At present the conditions are neutral for El Niño and the opposite of El Niño called La Nina is yet to kick in which may bring the temperatures down. But as of now, no such relief is expected.
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Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies Gavin Schmidt has said that El Niño was one of the factors that rose the temperatures this year. But in both 2015 and 2016 records would have been made even without it. He continued by stating that about 90% of the rise in temperatures in 2016 was due to rising greenhouse gas emissions.
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