Earth's hottest year was 2014
January 16, 2015
The year 2014 was the hottest in more than a century, US government scientists said on Friday. Both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA calculated that 2014 was the hottest year in 135 years of record-keeping.
According to NOAA, 2014 averaged 58.24 degrees Fahrenheit (14.6 Celsius) which is 1.24 degrees Fahrenheit (0.69 Celsius) above the 20th-century average. Also, last month was the hottest December on record. Previous record-breaking years were reported by NOAA in 2010 and 2005.
"While the ranking of individual years can be affected by chaotic weather patterns, the long-term trends are attributable to drivers of climate change that right now are dominated by human emissions of greenhouse gases," Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York, said in a statement.
Earlier, the Japanese weather agency and an independent group out of University of California Berkeley had also measured 2014 as the hottest year on record.
These records are raising new concerns about global warming, US government scientists said. Climate scientists also said that this shows global warming continues unimpaired.
ra/ng (Reuters, AFP)