Skip to footer

Another month, another record: Will 2015 overtake 2014 as Earth's hottest year?

Six of the past eight months have brought record-high global temperatures, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

|
Mary Altaffer/AP/File
A child plays in the sprinklers of Seward park in New York as temperatures soar into the 90s in the New York metro area, Aug. 17. Earth’s record breaking heat is sounding an awful lot like a broken record. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday that last month, this past summer and the first eight months of 2015 all smashed global records for heat.

Planet Earth is on track to set a new world record for hottest year.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Thursday that, so far, 2015 has broken all records for heat. There is near certainty that 2015 will break 2014’s hottest year record.

August was the fourth consecutive record-hot month and the summer marked the fifth consecutive record-hot season. In 2015, six of the eight months have been record breaking. August broke the 2014 record by .16 degrees Fahrenheit and is tied with January 2007 as the third warmest monthly temperature break from the average since 1880, according to the NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. April and January are the only months of 2015 that have not set new records.

"For scientists, these are just a few more data points in an increasingly long list of broken records (that) is due to warming temperatures," Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas Tech climate scientist, told the Associated Press in an email.

The Earth has broken monthly heat records 30 times and the seasonal heat record 11 times since 2000. A cold weather record has not been broken for nearly a hundred years, since 1916.

The natural El Niño is making many climate change situations worse, according to meteorologists. El Niño is the result of a warming of the Pacific Ocean and is having effects on weather worldwide. Still, El Nino is only slightly worsening what scientists claim is a result of human action.

“This is yet another reminder of the impact our unprecedented and inadvertent experiment – an experiment that began with the Industrial Revolution – is having on our planet today," Ms. Hayhoe continued in her email.

NOAA calculates a 97 percent chance that 2015 will beat 2014 in record heat. Those calculations were done before August. August makes the likeliness even higher, according to Deke Arndt, global monitoring chief for NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

August’s average Arctic sea ice extent was 620,000 square miles, which is more than 22 percent below the 1981-2010 average, according to the National Climate Data Record. August’s global average (67.1 degrees) and the summer average broke previous records by a sixth of a degree and a fifth of a degree respectively. Mr. Arndt called the changes “relatively large jumps over the last record.”

Due to El Niño and climate change, NOAA’s current winter forecast predicts cooler than normal temperature for states south of the Mason-Dixon line, from New Mexico to South Carolina. Temperatures will be warmer than average for the West Coast, Alaska, and states north of the Mason-Dixon line.

This report includes material from the Associated Press.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Another month, another record: Will 2015 overtake 2014 as Earth's hottest year?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2015/0918/Another-month-another-record-Will-2015-overtake-2014-as-Earth-s-hottest-year
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe