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2020 Tied for Warmest Year on Record, NASA Analysis Shows:
Continuing the planet's long-term warming trend, the year's globally averaged temperature was 1.84 degrees Fahrenheit (1.02 degrees Celsius) warmer than the baseline 1951-1980 mean, according to scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. 2020 edged out 2016 by a very small amount, within the margin of error of the analysis, making the years effectively tied for the warmest year on record.
"The last seven years have been the warmest seven years on record, typifying the ongoing and dramatic warming trend," said GISS Director Gavin Schmidt. "Whether one year is a record or not is not really that important – the important things are long-term trends. With these trends, and as the human impact on the climate increases, we have to expect that records will continue to be broken."
[...] A separate, independent analysis by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded that 2020 was the second-warmest year in their record, behind 2016. NOAA scientists use much of the same raw temperature data in their analysis, but have a different baseline period (1901-2000) and methodology. Unlike NASA, NOAA also does not infer temperatures in polar regions lacking observations, which accounts for much of the difference between NASA and NOAA records.
Like all scientific data, these temperature findings contain a small amount of uncertainty – in this case, mainly due to changes in weather station locations and temperature measurement methods over time. The GISS temperature analysis (GISTEMP) is accurate to within 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit with a 95 percent confidence level for the most recent period.
[...] In the long term, parts of the globe are also warming faster than others. Earth's warming trends are most pronounced in the Arctic, which the GISTEMP analysis shows is warming more than three times as fast as the rest of the globe over the past 30 years, according to Schmidt. The loss of Arctic sea ice – whose annual minimum area is declining by about 13 percent per decade – makes the region less reflective, meaning more sunlight is absorbed by the oceans and temperatures rise further still. This phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, is driving further sea ice loss, ice sheet melt and sea level rise, more intense Arctic fire seasons, and permafrost melt.
[...] NASA's full surface temperature data set – and the complete methodology used to make the temperature calculation – are available at:
The report acknowledged the effects of the fires in Australia and of the ENSO (El Nino-Southern Oscillation).
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2021, @08:56PM (4 children)
Troll?
Please show me a form of life on earth that does not increase the entropy of it's surroundings, ie increases the rate at which IR is emitted to space.
If you want to stop that, you literally want death to all life. Meanwhile, nature rewards activities that reduce the constraints on energy flow. Nature will wipe you out if you go up against it. Just go with the flow.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by https on Friday January 22 2021, @10:23PM (1 child)
Yes, troll. Deliberate attempt to trick the unwary and naive with lies, or to present bullshit arguments in a frame plausible to the unwary.
It's not that you're uninterested in participating in serious discourse. It's that you're deliberately trying to disrupt it, even though you have the intellectual capacity to add to it. The only possible redemption for such activity is if it is actually funny, but... said post isn't even trying for that. Hence, troll.
The problem is not the fact of entropy. The problem is that the most popular processes (fossil fuels) have serious ecosphere damaging effects at the scale humans have decided to implement them.
Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2021, @10:34PM
If you have a problem with burning fossil fuels on earth specifically then the solution is to do it in outer space or on other moons planets. This solution is consistent with the laws of nature and will be rewarded.
Alternatively you can use an even more productive energy source. Then people will just stop burning so much because it would be stupid to do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 23 2021, @07:01AM (1 child)
Fuck off, idiot. There's no equivalency between entropy increase and the rate of IR emission.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 23 2021, @04:22PM
IR emission is how waste heat leaves the earth.