We Are Living Through Second Hottest Year on Record - Study

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) just announced this week that the year 2019 is increasingly likely to be the planet's second- or third-warmest calendar year on record since modern temperature data collection began in 1880.

The announcement indicates the growing influence of long-term, human-caused global warming. It is extraordinarily uncommon, as there was a lack of a strong El Niño in the tropical Pacific Ocean this year.

Such events are linked with the hottest years since they boost global ocean temperatures and add vast amounts of heat to the climate across the Pacific Ocean.

There's about an 85 percent chance that 2019 would l wind up ranking as the second-warmest in NOAA's data set, with a possibility that it slips to third, according to a new report released Monday. However, there is a 99 percent chance that this year will wind up being a top-five-warmest year for the globe.

The average global land and ocean surface temperature for October, according to NOAA, was 1.76 degrees (0.98 degrees Celsius) above the 20th-century average, 0.11 of a degree shy of the record warm October set in 2015.

NOAA said ten warmest Octobers happened since 2003. Since 2015, the top-five warmest such months took place. October 2019 was the 43rd-straight month to be warmer than the 20th-century average and the 418th straight warmer-than-average month.

The data collected by NOAA means anyone younger than 38 years old has not lived in a cooler-than-average time from a global standpoint. Other bureaus that track global temperatures might rank this year slightly differently than NOAA will. However, their overall data is likely to be similar.

NOAA discovered that global land and ocean temperatures, so far, measured at 1.69 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average, 0.16 of a degree cooler than the record warmest year-to-date, set in 2016.

NASA, for example, inserts temperatures across the data-sparse Arctic by calculating the temperatures region-wide that are related to their closest observation location. NOAA, on the other hand, excluded certain portions of the Arctic region out, when it collected its data.

NOAA's data could be slightly underestimating global temperatures, though it wouldn't be by much considering the Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of the rest of the world.

The European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service, in an illustration of the differences that can occur between monitoring agencies, ranked October as Earth's hottest such month, slightly edging out October 2016. On the other hand, NOAA and NASA ranked October second on their lists.

Long-term trends forecast

The results show a clear, sharp spike that experts have shown can be explained through rising amounts of greenhouse gases - such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide - in the atmosphere.

NOAA said record warm October temperatures existed across parts of the North and Western Pacific Ocean, parts of South Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, northeastern Canada, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and South America.

The Western United States, where much of the Rockies are located, was the only region of record cold for the month. Despite less than a tenth of a degree behind the record year of 2016, global average sea-surface temperatures ranked second-warmest on record for the month when there was an extreme El Niño event.