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2016 was the Earth’s warmest year in the era of human industrial activity, barely surpassing the record highs set in the previous two years.
It coincided with new highs in the amounts of heat-trapping, climate change-causing gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.
The National Centers for Environmental Information collected worldwide observations for the 27th edition of the “State of the Climate,” which has been published since the mid-1990s.
Nearly 500 scientists from 64 countries contributed to the peer-reviewed report, representing areas of expertise ranging from oceanography to permafrost to atmospheric chemistry.
It doesn’t focus on attributing individual weather events to climate change or projecting future trends, though other studies have found that some recent extreme events like rainstorms, droughts and heat waves are consistent with the effects of climate change.
The pronounced El Niño pattern that existed from 2015 to early 2016 — the warming of the equatorial Pacific Ocean — made the planet warmer than it otherwise would have been, and contributed to some of 2016’s record warmth and regional weather anomalies.
It demonstrates that there is year-to-year variability on top of the decades-long warming trend. Last year’s global mean temperature clearly surpassed other years with similarly strong El Niño patterns, such as 1997 and 1982.
That warming does not happen in equal measure across the planet. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as areas closer to the equator.
It’s not just getting warmer — the symptoms and effects of climate change go far beyond air temperature over land surfaces.
The mass of Greenland’s ice sheet reached a record low.
The combination of glaciers melting and thermal expansion of the ocean caused the global mean sea level to climb for the sixth straight year.
Sea level doesn’t rise evenly every year or in every part of the coastline for several reasons, including the behavior of ocean currents.
In the case of Virginia and North Carolina, the coast is naturally subsiding faster than it does elsewhere on the East Coast, which exacerbates the effect of a global sea level rise.
Also at a record high was the temperature of the sea surface. It is now warming at a faster rate than it did during the 20th century, which reflects the fact that most of the heat added to the planet is absorbed by the ocean.
The report also noted biological findings like the northward shift of marine life and fisheries along the U.S. East Coast and more summer vegetation in the Arctic region.
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