NOAA predicts that 2020 will go down as hottest year on record

Right now, the year 2020 is close to being tied with 2016 for being the hottest year in recorded history. However, a major El Niño event helped propel 2016 to the top of the rankings, something 2020 didn’t have in its corner, according to Scientific American.

So if 2020 turns out to become the hottest year holder, it is more proof that because of global warming, the earth’s baseline temperature has shifted so much higher, despite the occurrences of El Nino weather patterns. One more statistic will then be added – All of NOAA’s record of the 10 warmest years will have occurred since 2005—and the top seven will have occurred since 2014.

Monkeys took to public ponds to escape the heat in Allahabad as India wilted under record high temperatures in some places

SANJAY KANOJIA, AFP

NOAA calculated that last month was the second hottest November on record, while NASA and the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) declared that November was 0.8C warmer than the 30-year average of 1981-2010 — more than 0.1C hotter than the previous record.

The discrepancy could be because NOAA does not have satellite coverage over the poles like NASA and Copernicus do. And the Arctic and Antarctic were very warm in November, NOAA climate scientist Ahira Sanchez-Lugo said to explain the difference.

As for the year 2020, NOAA’s calculations for the first 11 months shows temperatures were on average, .02 degrees (0.01 Celsius) cooler than record-hot 2016. But NOAA is predicting there is a 55 percent chance that 2020 will still end up being the warmest year on record.

People relax in the hot weather in Green Park as the heatwave continues in London

ISABEL INFANTES, AFP

NOAA says that its prediction is based on December temperatures being as much above normal as November was. Florida, Virginia, and Maryland so far have had their hottest year on record, while California had its hottest fall. NASA, in the meantime, is also saying 2020 so far is the warmest on record and it’s likely to stay that way.

The World MeteorologicalOrganization (WMO) also announced last week that 2020 is set to become one of the three warmest years on record. The addition of one more month of data from C3S shows that 2020 is now even closer to the 2016 record.

It boils down to this – If December is just 0.59 degrees (0.33 degrees Celsius) above the 1980 to 2010 average, 2020 should be the hottest year on record said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with the Berkeley Earth climate-monitoring group, reports ABC News.