2018 takes the podium as one of the hottest years on record. Let’s look deeper.

“We’ve known since the 1980s that Earth has had a fever,” stressed Sarah Green, an environmental chemist, in a recent interview.

That fever continued, undiminished, in 2018. 

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies keeps track of Earth’s changing temperatures with a data bank that reaches back to the 1880s. This year will end up as the 4th-warmest year in recorded history, Gavin Schmidt, the director of the NASA program, said over email.

“I’d emphasize that any one year’s temperature is not that important, but the long-term trends are — and they are unmistakable and furthermore, exactly in line with predictions made years ago,” Schmidt, a climate scientist, said. “The trends are due almost entirely to us (and specifically the fossil-fuel related increases in CO2).” Read more…

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