Fueled by a combination of the natural El Niño cycle and man-made global warming, 2015 was the planet's warmest year since records began in 1880, federal scientists announced Wednesday.
In 2015, the average temperature across the Earth's land and ocean surfaces was 1.62 degrees above average, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA.) This is the largest margin by which an annual global temperature record has been broken, NOAA said.
Record warmth was broadly spread around the world, NOAA reported, with portions of central and South America, Europe, and central Asia seeing some of the warmest temperatures.
A separate analysis of data from NASA agreed with NOAA's findings. "2015 was remarkable even in the context of the larger, long-term warming trend," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
According to NASA, most of the warming has happened in the last 35 years, and 15 of the 16 warmest years have occurred since 2001.
Measurements of carbon dioxide, the gas most responsible for global warming, continued to set new monthly records in 2015 — for the first time ever, routinely above 400 parts per million, NASA said.
The rising heat was accompanied by extreme weather events such as heat waves inIndia and Pakistan that killed thousands; continuing drought and record-low snowpack in California; crop failures raking large parts of Africa; uncontrolled wildfires in Indonesia; and record rains and flooding in Texas, Oklahoma and other U.S. states.
