By Paul Homewood
The past seven years have been the hottest on record, according to new data from the EU’s satellite system.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service said 2021 was the fifth-warmest year, with record-breaking heat in some regions.
And the amount of warming gases in our atmosphere continued to increase.
Governments are committed to limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C to curb climate change. But scientists warn that time is fast running out.
The environmental, human and economic costs of hotter temperatures are already being seen globally.
Europe lived through its warmest summer, and temperature records in western US and Canada were broken by several degrees. Extreme wildfires in July and August burnt almost entire towns to the ground and killed hundreds.
“These events are a stark reminder of the need to change our ways, take decisive and effective steps toward a sustainable society and work towards reducing net carbon emissions,” Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, explains.
The Copernicus data comes from a constellation of Sentinel satellites that monitor the Earth from orbit, as well as measurements taken at ground level.
Fifth-warmest year
Copernicus data showed that 2021 was the fifth-hottest on record, marginally warmer than 2015 and 2018. Taken together, the past seven years were the hottest seven years on record by a clear margin, the agency explained.
The 2021 average temperature was 1.1-1.2C above the pre-industrial level around 150 years ago.
It would be easy to dismiss the latest global temperature figure as a non-event. Who celebrates fifth place in anything?
If we were in a film, these annual temperature updates would be the ominous drum beat signalling the plot is darkening.
They measure out the pace of change in our world. The increments may be tiny – a fraction of a degree – but the direction of travel is inescapable.
And make no mistake, the rhythm they mark out increasingly sets the pace for all our lives. Think of the fires and floods that affected so many people in 2021.
And now look again at what the data is telling us: the seven hottest years ever recorded have been the last seven years.
We can’t say we weren’t warned.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-59915690
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Paul Homewood:
Quite what a picture of a girl cooling herself down has to do with anything beats me. Evidently we did not have hot weather in the past!
Despite the visions of apocalypse, Justin Rowlatt misses the crucial issue. Global warming is taking place far more slowly than the models predicted:
RSS Satellite Global Temperature anomalies v Climate Models
It is those computer models that dictated UN climate policies, based on ludicrous projections of rapid warming. In reality, the amount of warming since 1979 has been tiny.
Indeed, when you factor in margins of error, there has been no statistically significant warming since 1998.
You might also note that the satellite data begins in 1979, which just so happens to be the coldest period of the 20thC. At the time it was acknowledged that global temperatures had decline by 0.5C since 1940, which offsets most of the increase since 1979.
This decline in temperatures coincides with the cold phase of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, which has been in warm phase since the 1990s and is soon due to revert to cold.
Everything therefore points to a standstill in global warming for coming decades, and quite probably a period of cooling.
None of this justifies the hysteria promulgated by the BBC, or the Net Zero policies being enforced across the western world.
Final comment.
The BBC makes a big issue about the supposed “warmest summer in Europe”. Let us suppose we had a thermostat to take the world’s climate back to those halcyon days of the 18thC.
I wonder what Justin Rowlatt would have made of headlines that read:
“Europe has just had its coldest year on record”
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Global Temperature Report for 2021
We find that 2021 was nominally the 6th warmest year since the start of direct observations, at 1.2 °C above pre-industrial.
Temperatures in 2021 were cooler than 2020, in part due to a persistent La Niña event.https://t.co/6OHAYmhYvX pic.twitter.com/Sd2FQSBB4R
— Berkeley Earth (@BerkeleyEarth) January 13, 2022
