2017 second hottest year ever recorded in 20th century, say scientists

One of the latest studies led by a group of government researchers has found that 2017 was among the hottest years ever recorded.

According to NASA, the year was the second hottest year, while an earlier study by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) suggested that 2017 was the third warmest on record.

Apparently, 2016 and 2015 were hotter than 2017 engulfing much of the land and ocean surfaces across the world.

People in 2017 witnessed a temperature of 1.51 degrees Fahrenheit, above the average temperature seen in the 20th century, researchers from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information stated.

"What is more important than the ranking of an individual year is the overall, long-term trend of warming since the late 1970s, and especially this century," said Omar Baddour, senior scientist at WMO.

"Along with rising temperatures, we are seeing more extreme weather with huge socio-economic impacts," he added.

WMO is also working on to combine datasets from US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), and the Met Office Hadley Centre and Climatic Research Unit in the UK for a consolidated temperature ranking for 2017.

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According to NOAA, the month of November was the fifth warmest on record, whilst NASA and ECMWF Copernicus Climate Change Service both said it was the third warmest.

During November 2017, warmer-than-average temperatures dominated across much of the world’s land and ocean surfaces, with the most notable temperature departures from average across the Northern Hemisphere.

Parts of the western contiguous US, northern Canada, northern and western Alaska, western Asia and Far Eastern Russia had temperature departures from average that were 2.0 degrees Celsius or greater, according to NOAA.

As an indication of swift regional climate change in and near the Arctic, the average temperature observed at the weather station has now changed so rapidly that it triggered an algorithm designed to detect artificial changes in a station’s instrumentation or environment and disqualified itself from the NCEI Alaskan temperature analysis.

The omission was noticed by the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), which realised that data from Reykjavik, Alaska had been missing for all of 2017 and the last few months of 2016.

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Elsewhere in the Arctic, a separate analysis from the EMF Copernicus Climate Change service said that November’s temperature was more than six degrees Celsius above average in parts of Svalbard, as it was in October.