Six different calculations found 2021 was between the fifth and seventh hottest year since the late 1800s. NASA said 2021 tied with 2018 for sixth warmest, while NOAA puts last year in sixth place by itself, ahead of 2018.
Scientists say a La Nina — natural cooling of parts of the central Pacific that changes weather patterns globally and brings chilly deep ocean water to the surface — dampened global temperatures just as its flip side, El Nino, boosted them in 2016.
Still, they said 2021 was the hottest La Nina year on record and that the year did not represent a cooling off of human-caused climate change but provided more of the same heat.
“So it’s not quite as headline-dominating as being the warmest on record, but give it another few years and we’ll see another one of those” records, said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of the Berkeley Earth monitoring group that also ranked 2021 the sixth hottest. “It’s the long-term trend, and it’s an indomitable march upward.”
Gavin Schmidt, the climate scientist who heads NASA’s temperature team, said “the long-term trend is very, very clear. And it’s because of us. And it’s not going to go away until we stop increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
The last eight years have been the eight hottest on record, NASA and NOAA data agree. Global temperatures, averaged over a 10-year period to take out natural variability, are nearly 2 degrees (1.1 degrees Celsius) warmer than 140 years ago, their data shows.
There was such a distinctive jump in temperatures about eight to 10 years ago that scientists have started looking at whether the rise in temperatures is speeding up. Both Schmidt and Hausfather said early signs point to that but it's hard to know for sure.
“I think you can see the acceleration, but whether it’s statistically robust is not quite clear,” Schmidt said in an interview. “If you just look at the last the last 10 years, how many of them are way above the trend line from the previous 10 years? Almost all of them.”
The global average temperature last year was 58.5 degrees (14.7 Celsius), according to NOAA. In 1988, NASA’s then-chief climate scientist James Hansen grabbed headlines when he testified to Congress about global warming in a year that was the hottest on record at the time. Now, the 57.7 degrees (14.3 Celsius) of 1988 ranks as the 28th hottest year on record.
Last year, 1.8 billion people in 25 Asian, African and Middle Eastern nations had their hottest years on record, including China, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Iran, Myanmar and South Korea, according to Berkeley Earth.
The deep ocean, where most heat is stored in the seas, also set a record for warmth in 2021, according to a separate new study.
“Ocean warming, aside from causing coral bleaching and threatening sea life and fish populations we rely upon for roughly 25% of our protein intake globally, is destabilizing Antarctic ice shelves and threatens massive ... sea level rise if we don’t act,” said study co-author Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University climate scientist.
The last time Earth had a cooler than normal year by NOAA or NASA calculations was 1976. That means 69% of the people on the planet — more than 5 billion people under age 45 — have never experienced such a year, based on United Nations data.
North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello, 39, who wasn’t part of the new reports but said they make sense, said, “I’ve only lived in a warming world and I wish that the younger generations did not have to say the same. It didn’t have to be this way.”
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Among all the other events of the last few years, you may have missed this one: Spermageddon. This is the fun name for the idea that sperm counts among mainly ‘Western’ men are in freefall. The Spermageddon hype began with the publication of a 2017 study showing a nearly 60% drop in overall sperm counts in men living in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.
But four years later, it seems that Spermageddon has been overblown. By a lot. And all that hype has obscured the real issue behind declining male fertility.
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As millions of kids go back to school, districts across the country are determined to keep class in person, despite a surge in COVID cases. In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams has vowed to keep the nation's largest school system open amid Omicron, citing the disastrous effect of remote learning on students. Oswald Feliz, NYC council member who sits on the health and education committee, joined Cheddar to discuss the city's plan to combat the recent surge and keep kids in school.
Schools across the country are determined to keep class in session, despite the rapidly-spreading Omicron variant. While many parents prefer in-person learning, they also worry whether the current public health guidelines will be enough to protect their kids. Erin Richards, national education reporter for USA Today, joined Cheddar to discuss how are schools are preparing for the surge to avoid another round of remote learning.
With the annual CES convention underway amid COVID, HP unveiled rolled out a number of new products virtually this year, including new gaming PCs and 4K display monitors. But as industries look toward a greener future, HP is working with the climate crisis in mind. James McCall, chief sustainability officer at HP, joined Cheddar's Kristen Scholer to discuss the company's climate goals, which includes reducing its carbon footprint to net-zero by 2040. He admitted that reaching the ambitious goal will be difficult because much of the company's emissions totals come from third parties. "A large part of our footprint is outside of HP's direct control. A lot of it comes either from our incoming supply chain, the materials, our manufacturing process, or about 30 to 40 percent of it comes from our consumer-use base," McCall told Cheddar.
Pfizer and BioNTech are working to develop an mRNA-based shingles vaccine following the success of the COVID-19 shot. This latest collaboration will mark the third time the pharmaceutical companies have worked together on a vaccine.
