Global temperatures in 2020 among highest on record, says WMO report

Global temperatures in 2020 were among the highest on record and rivalled 2016 as the hottest year ever, according to international data compiled by the World Meteorological Organization and released on Thursday.
 
The heat came even as a global economic slowdown from the Covid-19 pandemic cut deeply into emissions from fossil fuels, adding evidence that carbon dioxide concentrations already in the atmosphere have set the planet on a warming track.
 
The WMO report included data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the UK Met Office, both of which ranked 2020 as the second-warmest year on record, as a cooling trend called La Ninaa failed to tame global temperatures. NASA, whose data was also included, said 2020 tied with 2016 as the warmest year on record.

 

The news is "yet another stark reminder of the relentless pace of climate change, which is destroying lives and livelihoods across our planet," UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said. “Making peace with nature is the defining task of the 21st century.”
 
WMO said the differences in average global tempe­ratures among the three warmest years, 2016, 2019 and 2020, were indisting­uishably small.  The average global temperature in 2020 was about 14.9 C, or about 1.2 C above the 1850-1900 pre-indu­strial level. That approached the preferred 1.5 C lower limit of temperature increase the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate sought to avert.

All five datasets surveyed showed that 2011-2020 was the warmest decade on record, and NOAA said the seven warmest years since rec­ord-keeping began in 1880 have occurred since 2014. There is at least a one-in-five chance that the average global temp­erature will temporarily exceed that limit by 2024, according to a WMO analysis.