With the likes of Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough continuously warning us about global warming, recent data has show that the last decade has been the hottest ever on record – proving the two of them right.
2016 was officially the hottest year of the decade with 2019 only being a few Celsius cooler: worryingly six of the warmest years on record occurred during the past ten years.
The concerning news was discovered by researchers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Gavin Schmidt, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, said:
The decade that just ended is clearly the warmest decade on record; every decade since the 1960’s clearly has been warmer than the one before.
We crossed over into more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit warming territory in 2015 and we are unlikely to go back. This shows that what’s happening is persistent, not a fluke due to some weather phenomenon: we know that the long-term trends are being driven by the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
By using climate models and statistics, scientists say the heating of the planet is due to human activity – so quit blaming flatulent cows.
They concluded that the increase has mostly been driven by increased emissions into the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases produced by us.
Basically, we’re the worst.
If you’re sat there thinking this year didn’t feel that hot where you were, that’s because different regions of the Earth will experience different amounts of warming: for example the Arctic region has warmed slightly more than three times faster than the rest of the world since 1970.
As I’m sure you already know, rising temperatures in the atmosphere and ocean are contributing to the continued mass loss from Greenland and Antarctica and to increases in some extreme events, such as heat waves, wildfires, intense precipitation.
An example of this would be the devastating Australian wildfires currently happening – something which has destroyed thousands of homes and killed millions of animals and wildlife. You can read more about the wildfires here.
As well as wildfires, NASA has warned that due to the Greenland Ice Sheet rapidly melting, more flooding is likely to happen as it directly impacts the rising of sea levels.
According to a study by NASA, the Greenland Ice Sheet has lost 3.8 trillion tons of ice between 1992 and 2018.
Some simple ways you can help reduce the effects of global warming are by recycling, using less hot water, using a cloth instead of kitchen roll and to avoid buying products with lots of packing (here’s looking at you, Amazon).
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Niamh Shackleton is a pint sized person and journalist at UNILAD. After studying Multimedia Journalism at the University of Salford, she did a year at Caters News Agency as a features writer in Birmingham before deciding that Manchester is (arguably) one of the best places in the world, and therefore moved back up north. She’s also UNILAD’s unofficial crazy animal lady.