Report: 2015 Earth’s hottest year on record
Report: 2015 Earth’s hottest year on record
By: Melissa Randall
@MRandallABC6
It’s January in Southern New England; people all bundled up, and praying winter will be short lived. So, it’s hard to imagine that on a day like today scientists are talking about the heat, but they are.
“2015 was the warmest year in more than a hundred years, ever since people have been keeping records and actually it beat the old record not by a little bit, but by a lot,” said Professor Timothy Herbert, Chair of the Geological Sciences Department at Brown University in Providence.
A new report by the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA Wednesday says 2015’s average global temperature was 58.62 degrees Fahrenheit, passing the previous record year, 2014, by a margin of between 0.29 and 0.23 degrees.
“What this study let’s us do is look at how the whole globe, place to place, is changing, and put that picture together with the understanding of climate to take us away from our day to day experience of living in Providence to see what the whole world is doing,” said Herbert.
Scientists say there were several contributing factors to the record breaking heat including global warming and complex weather patterns. They also believe this could be the new ‘norm’.
“The El Nino that’s brewing now has not yet begun to affect climate significantly, so we can actually look forward, almost certainly, to even more warming in the next year or two due to El Nino. Now we don’t expect it to last, but it will add to the global warming picture,” said Herbert.
Is beating the record for earth’s warmest year a good thing?
“That depends on who you are and where you are,” said Herbert.
Locally, the concern with rising temperatures is the impact on the sea level.
© WLNE-TV 2016
