2016 was the Hottest Year on Record – Third in a Row

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has announced 2016 to be the hottest year on record. This was the third year in a row to set the global heat record.

On Wednesday, NASA and NOAA held a joint press conference to reveal the new record.

According to scientists, the Earth is getting warmer and warmer each year as 16 of the 17 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000.

The WMO says temperatures last year over the oceans and continents were 1.1 degree Celsius above the pre-industrial average, and the last record cold year had happened a century back in 1911.

According to climate scientists, the main culprit behind rising of Earth temperature include is the greenhouse gas pollution caused by burning of fossil fuels and cutting down of rainforests.

“The spate of record-warm years that we have seen in the 21st century can only be explained by human-caused climate change,” says Michael Mann, director of the Earth Science Center at Pennsylvania State University.

The Earth also experienced a record El Niño from 2015 into 2016 which played a significant role in global warming, although this factor is relatively small compared with the devastation that humans are doing on Earth in terms of climate change and global warming.

James Hansen, former director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told CNN, that the “record is due to a combination of the (natural) strong 2015-2016 El Niño (warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean surface) and the strong global warming trend that has continued from 1970 to the present.”

But “the human-caused, long-term warming trend is the bigger contributor,” he added.

The data also reveals that the Arctic is also warming at a much faster rate now, and temperatures in this region is now more than 3 degrees Celsius above compared to what they were in previous decades.

“The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the global average” according to the WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas, who also revealed that humans on Earth have “also broken sea ice minimum records in the Arctic and Antarctic.”