2019 was the second hottest year on record
Environment — di Andrea Barolini
Data from the European Copernicus service have confirmed that 2019 was the second hottest year on record, just 0.04 degrees Celsius short of the all-time record.
2019 was the second hottest year on record
Data from the European Copernicus service have confirmed that 2019 was the second hottest year on record, just 0.04 degrees Celsius short of the all-time record.
2019 was the second hottest year on record worldwide, bringing to a close a record-breaking decade. The data were confirmed by the European Copernicus service for climate change, whose director Carlo Buontempo described it as a year that was "once again exceptionally warm, with numerous monthly records broken".
2019 was the second warmest year in recorded history. The signs are crystal clear. Arithmetic is pretty dire. We need long-term plans and commitment that countries need to deliver. ~ @AndrewSteerWRI #stw2020 ow.ly/5Uqb50xRaCI #climateaction #actonclimate #SteopUp2020 #NDCs
The all-time heat record of 2016 almost broken
By just 0.04 degrees Celsius, 2019 fell short of 2016, which therefore remains the hottest year on record. In that case, however, the global average temperature had been pushed upward by a particularly intense El Niño event — a phenomenon that did not recur during 2019. Global warming is further confirmed by the fact that the last five years have been the hottest ever recorded, with an anomaly of between +1.1 and +1.2 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Likewise, the decade 2010–2019 was the hottest since measurements have been taken regularly.
The world is therefore drawing dangerously close to the threshold that should represent the maximum limit not to be exceeded by the end of this century, namely 2 degrees. This is what the Paris Agreement calls for, though it also states that efforts must be made to stay "as close as possible to 1.5 degrees".
The 2010s were also the warmest decade in history, with the last five years being the hottest ever recorded. huffp.st/Mw47W1l
It is no coincidence that the early wildfires that have been devastating Australia for weeks found extremely fertile ground, owing to the drought that had struck the country and, precisely, to the exceptionally high temperatures. This explosive combination has had devastating consequences: at least 80,000 square kilometres of forests have already burned — an area equivalent to that of a country such as Ireland.
Italy closes out a scorching decade
In Europe, too, a succession of unprecedented heatwaves swept through during the summer. Copernicus describes the 2019 summer as the hottest on record, surpassing in this respect those of 2014, 2015 and 2018, which were already sweltering. Similarly, particularly high temperatures were recorded in Alaska and across much of the Arctic.
In Italy too, as reported by the Ansa news agency, 2019 closed "with an anomaly of +0.96 degrees Celsius compared to the average". Meanwhile the decade, as noted by Michele Brunetti — head of the Historical Climatology Database at the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate of the National Research Council (Cnr-Isac) in Bologna — was the hottest on record.