WASHINGTON (AP) -
Earth’s fever got worse last year, breaking dozens of climate records,
scientists said in a massive report nicknamed the annual physical for the
planet.
Soon after 2015
ended, it was proclaimed the hottest on record. The new report shows the
broad extent of other records and near-records on the planet’s climatic
health. Those include record heat energy absorbed by the oceans and lowest
groundwater storage levels globally, according to Tuesday’s report from the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“I think the time
to call the doctor was years ago,” NOAA climate monitoring chief Deke Arndt,
co-editor of the report, said in an email. “We are awash in multiple
symptoms.”
The 2015 State of
the Climate report examined 50 different aspects of climate, including
dramatic melting of Arctic sea ice and glaciers worldwide. A dozen different
nations set hottest year records, including Russia and China. South Africa
had the hottest temperature ever recorded in the month of October: 119.1
degrees Fahrenheit (48.4 degrees Celsius).
“There is really
only one word for this parade of shattered climate records: grim,” said
Georgia Tech climate scientist Kim Cobb, who wasn’t part of the report, but
called it “exhaustive and thorough.”
But it’s more than
just numbers on a graph. Scientists said the turbo-charged climate affected
walrus and penguin populations and played a role in dangerous algae blooms,
such as one off the Pacific Northwest coast. And there were brutal heat
waves all over the world, with ones in Indian and Pakistan killing thousands
of people.
Much of the intense
record-breaking and record-flirting weather was because of a combination of
a natural El Nino - the periodic warming of parts of the Pacific that
changes weather globally - and ever increasing man-made global warming.
“This impacts
people. This is real life,” said NOAA climate scientist Jessica Blunden,
co-editor of the report published Tuesday in the Bulletin of the American
Meteorological Society.
Oklahoma University
meteorology professor Jason Furtado said in an email that the report, which
he wasn’t part of, illustrates the combined power of nature and humans on
Earth’s climate: “It was like injecting an already amped-up climate system
with a dose of (natural) steroids.”
About 450
scientists from around the world helped write the report and in it NOAA
highlighted one of the lesser-known measurements, ocean heat content. About
93 percent of the heat energy trapped by greenhouse gases - such as carbon
dioxide from the burning of coal, oil and gas - goes directly into the
ocean, the report said. And ocean heat content hit record levels both near
the surface and deep.
NOAA oceanographer
Gregory C. Johnson, a study co-author, said the oceans are storing more heat
energy because of man-made climate change with an extra El Nino spike.
Johnson summed up
Earth’s climate in a haiku, published deep inside the report:
“El Ni–o waxes,
warm waters shoal,
flow eastward,
Earth’s fever
rises.”