Thursday, November 26, 2015
Associated Press
WASHINGTON
Because of man-made global warming and a strong El Nino, Earth’s wild weather this year is bursting the annual heat record, the World Meteorological Organization announced on Wednesday.
The United Nations weather agency’s early-bird report on 2015 says it is the hottest year on record, surpassing last year’s record heat. It made the proclamation without waiting for the end of the year because it has been so extraordinarily hot, forecast to stay that way and unlikely to cool down enough to not set a record.
The report comes the week before world leaders assemble in Paris to try to negotiate an agreement to fight climate change.
“We have really broken records almost everywhere,” the agency’s secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, said Wednesday at a press conference in Geneva. “Remember climate change is not only about temperature ... but a significant impact of climate change is on extreme events.”
The report is not surprising: Scientists at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and elsewhere already were saying that 2015 likely would be the hottest. The U.N. agency, NOAA, NASA and Japan’s weather agency all say 2014 is the current record hot year with a global temperature of 14.57 degrees Celsius, 58.23 degrees F.