2016 was the hottest year ever

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA – MAY 5: Environmental activists protesting on Table Mountain’s Lion’s Head peak on May 5, 2012, in Cape Town, South Africa. Protesters created a large red dot on the mountain to signify the dangers involved with global warming. (Photo by Gallo Images / Sunday Times / Esa Alexander)

2016 was the hottest year ever recorded and it’s basically all our fault

But Donald Trump still reckons climate change is a hoax.

2016 was the hottest year ever

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA – MAY 5: Environmental activists protesting on Table Mountain’s Lion’s Head peak on May 5, 2012, in Cape Town, South Africa. Protesters created a large red dot on the mountain to signify the dangers involved with global warming. (Photo by Gallo Images / Sunday Times / Esa Alexander)

 

For the third year in a row, the average temperatures across 12 months set a record for being the hottest ever.

Three agencies – the UK Met Office and Nasa and Noaa in the US – released their data on Wednesday and it shows that out of the 17 hottest ears ever recorded, 16 have been this century.

While official records don’t go back further than 1880, scientists believe that the world has not been this hot for 115 000 years. The carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is also at an all-time high with scientist claiming it’s at it’s highest level for four million years.

The natural El Niño climate phenomenon saw a boom in temperatures with South Africa copping it as drought set in across the country. However, scientists warn that carbon emissions are at shocking levels and will continue to drive up the heat.

According to The Guardian:

“The data from Noaa showed a run of 16 successive months from May 2015 to August 2016 when the global average temperature broke or equalled previous records, while no land area experienced an annual average temperature in 2016 that was cooler than 20th-century average.”

It also reports:

Prof Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, said: “The spate of record-warm years that we have seen in the 21st century can only be explained by human-caused climate change. The effect of human activity on our climate is no longer subtle. It’s plain as day, as are the impacts – in the form of record floods, droughts, superstorms and wildfires – that it is having on us and our planet.”

In 2016, a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report said human-induced global warming had contributed to at least half the extreme weather events studied in recent years. It estimated that the risk of extreme heat increased by as much as ten times because of human activity.

A new high of 42.7C was recorded in Pretoria, South Africa in January last year, one of many of the “new highs” across the world.