28/01/2021

This Chart Shows How Global Temperatures Have Risen Since 1950

World Economic Forum

The global temperature average has increased by 0.82 degrees Celsius when compared to the 20th century average. Image: Pixabay/qimono

Key Points
  • Global warming led to 2020 and 2016 being around 1.2 degrees Celsius hotter than the average temperature during the 19th century.
  • Scientists increasingly believe in a direct relationship between global warming and catastrophic weather events such as flooding.
Global warming has led to 2020 being tied with 2016 as the hottest year ever recorded by scientists, according to a new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

The report shows data that has become quite common over the last decades, with temperatures inching up higher and higher from the 20th century average.

A look into the data of temperature increases over the last decade shows the rate of increase appears to be rising.

According to data collected by Bloomberg from the NOAA, the global temperature average has increased by 0.82 degrees Celsius when compared to the 20th century average.

The rate of increase, however, increased to roughly 0.18 degrees Celsius each decade since 1981, signaling a quickening of both warming surface and ocean temperatures across the globe.

Overall, 2020 and 2016 were around 1.2 degrees Celsius hotter than the average temperature during the 19th century, with 2019 coming very close.

While scientists predict 2021 to be another top 10 hottest year, the enormous weather pattern La Niña in the Pacific Ocean is expected to bring cooler temperatures than previous years.

Miniscule changes in global temperature are, and will continue to have, drastic consequences related to weather events and patterns.

Wildfires, hurricanes, floods and droughts are some of the most common, and have already seen a noticeable uptick in occurrences over the last few decades.

 According to Bloomberg, scientists’ confidence in the direct relationship between catastrophic weather events and rising global temperatures continues to rise each year.

Ultimately, decades-old models from climate scientists across the world have been relatively accurate with how temperatures would increase by 2020.

Carbon dioxide pollution has been one of the largest drivers of this rise, many scientists say, and even a swift cutback on emissions may prove ineffective in completely halting the rapid temperature increases.

Overall, 2020 and 2016 were around 1.2 degrees Celsius hotter than the average temperature during the 19th century. Image: Statista   
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This Giant Ice Cube Represents How Much Ice We're Losing Every Year

Gizmodo Earther - Brian Kahn

Graphic: Planetary Visions

We talk about ice a lot here on Earther—or more specifically, the growing absence of it. A new study puts what’s happening to the planet in striking perspective. While I can tell you the results show 1.2 trillion tons of ice disappeared every year since 1994, it’s a lot easier to grasp as a visual.

That cube of ice up there towers 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) into the sky like a sunshade over Manhattan and stretches over a huge swath of New Jersey, from Newark Airport to Jersey City. That’s how much we’ve lost to burning fossil fuels on average per year over the past two decades. The skyscrapers of the Financial District and Midtown are toothpicks. More ominously, the cube is getting bigger as ice loss accelerates.

The ice cube illustration is tied to a study published in the Cryosphere on Monday that looks at, uh, the state of the cryosphere. A team of scientists from across the UK used satellite measurements and climate models to explore what’s happening to every nook and cranny of ice around the globe. While most studies focus on either sea ice or ice on land, the new paper looks at both to give us a better understanding of how much ice has melted due to climate change.

“There has been a huge international effort to study individual regions, such as glaciers spread around the planet, the polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, the ice shelves floating around Antarctica, and sea ice drifting in the Arctic and Southern oceans,” Tom Slater, the study’s lead author and ice researcher at the University of Leeds, said in an email. “We felt that there was now enough data to be able to combine these efforts and examine all the ice being lost from the planet.”

The results show Arctic sea ice is the fastest-disappearing ice on the planet. A staggering 7.6 trillion tons have turned to liquid from 1994 to 2017, the period for which the study had data. That was followed by Antarctic ice shelves, which have seen 6.5 trillion tons of ice vanish, sometimes in catastrophic fashion. 

The most recent example is Iceberg A68, a Delaware-size piece of ice that ripped off the Larsen C ice shelf in 2017 and has since wandered the Southern and Atlantic oceans. It most recently had a near run-in with an ecologically sensitive island

But other, more insidious forms of ice shelf drama are afoot. The study doesn’t just look at ice area; it also looks at ice volume. And the most shocking impacts on ice shelves are happening beneath the surface. Ice shelves jut out over the ocean, holding back glaciers on ice sheets on land. 

But in West Antarctica, satellite and direct observations show warm water has been eating away at ice shelves and could eventually cause them to collapse. If that happens, sea level rise will accelerate and won’t stop for centuries; the ice in West Antarctica could raise seas by more than 10 feet (3 meters). 

Glaciers on land in Alaska, the Himalayas, and elsewhere are also major drivers of sea level rise, as are the glaciers and ice sheets of Greenland. They’re all disappearing at an alarming rate. The threat of water loss in regions that rely on glacier and snowmelt is certainly an acute concern

So, too, is the disappearance of sea ice and its impact on traditional ways of life in the Arctic. And incremental but quickening sea level rise can play out in dramatic fashion when hurricanes roar ashore, pushing storm surge farther inland thanks to the climate change-driven boost. Perhaps most ominously, the melt is just a tiny aspect of the changes happening.

“We found that it took only about 3% of the excess heat created by greenhouse gas emissions to melt all this ice, a surprisingly small amount of energy to melt such a large amount of ice, which has a disproportionately large effect on our environment,” Slater said.

In that light, the giant ice cube from hell is showing just a tiny portion of the impact of human activities on the planet.

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Global Ice Loss Accelerating At Record Rate, Study Finds

The Guardian

Rate of loss now in line with worst-case scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The rate of ice loss accelerated by 65% between 1994 and 2017, the paper found. Photograph: Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

The melting of ice across the planet is accelerating at a record rate, with the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets speeding up the fastest, research has found.

The rate of loss is now in line with the worst-case scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading authority on the climate, according to a paper published on Monday in the journal The Cryosphere.

Thomas Slater, lead author and research fellow at the centre for polar observation and modelling at the University of Leeds, warned that the consequences would be felt around the world. “Sea level rise on this scale will have very serious impacts on coastal communities this century,” he said.

About 28tn tonnes of ice was lost between 1994 and 2017, which the authors of the paper calculate would be enough to put an ice sheet 100 metres thick across the UK. About two thirds of the ice loss was caused by the warming of the atmosphere, with about a third caused by the warming of the seas.

Over the period studied, the rate of ice loss accelerated by 57%, the paper found, from 0.8tn tonnes a year in the 1990s to 1.2tn tonnes a year by 2017. About half of all the ice lost was from land, which contributes directly to global sea level rises. The ice loss over the study period, from 1994 to 2017, is estimated to have raised sea levels by 35 millimetres.

The greatest quantities of ice were lost from floating ice in the polar regions, raising the risk of a feedback mechanism known as albedo loss. White ice reflects solar radiation back into space – the albedo effect – but when floating sea ice melts it uncovers dark water which absorbs more heat, speeding up the warming further in a feedback loop.

Glaciers showed the next biggest loss of ice volume, with more than 6tn tonnes lost between 1994 and 2017, about a quarter of global ice loss over the period. The shrinking of glaciers threatens to cause both flooding and water shortages in some regions, because as large volumes melt they can overwhelm downstream areas, then shrunken glaciers produce less of the steady water flow needed for agriculture.

Inès Otosaka, report co-author and a PhD researcher at the University of Leeds centre for polar observation and modelling, said: “As well as contributing to global mean sea level rise, mountain glaciers are also critical as a freshwater resource for local communities. The retreat of glaciers around the world is therefore of crucial importance, at both local and global scales.”

The study, titled Earth’s Ice Imbalance, used satellite observations over the 23-year period to assess ice all over the globe. Previous studies have examined parts of the world rather than making a comprehensive assessment of the data. The research team included the University of Edinburgh, University College London and Earthwave, a data science organisation, and was funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council.

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