2014
2014 was the globe’s
hottest year ever recorded by thermometers, and likely the hottest in the
history of human civilization.
This data come from Japan’s Meteorological Agency, one of
the four primary record-keeping organizations that routinely plot the now
familiar upward bend in Earth’s surface temperature.
The new record amounts to yet another warning sign on the
civilizational superhighway toward a worst-case climate scenario. Greenhouse
gas emissions also hit a worldwide high in 2014, meaning global warming
continues to accelerate, not ease. Projections suggest that global carbon
emissions will hit another high in 2015, thanks to continued economic growth
and a recent dip in oil prices.
Europe, the Arctic,
Africa, Australia, South America, the Caribbean, western North America, and
East Asia experienced warmer-than-average temperatures, while
colder-than-normal areas were limited to Central Asia and the Eastern United
States, according to the JMA. Data from other agencies showed global oceans
contributed the most to the new heat record, breaking the all-time temperature
mark despite the lack of an official El Niño—a periodic warming of the tropical
Pacific Ocean that in the past has been linked to global temperature records.
CAUSE
The heat means global warming continues to escalate. Global
warming and climate change both refer to the observed century-scale rise in the
average temperature of the Earth's climate system and its related effects. Most
climate scientists agree the main cause of the current global warming trend is
human expansion of the "greenhouse effect" — warming that result when
the atmosphere traps heat radiating from Earth toward space.
HUMAN
ACTIVITY
In its recently released Fourth Assessment Report, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 1,300 independent
scientific experts from countries all over the world under the auspices of the
United Nations, concluded there's a more than 90 percent probability that human
activities over the past 250 years have warmed our planet.
The industrial activities that our modern civilization
depends upon have raised atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from 280 parts per
million to 379 parts per million in the last 150 years. The panel also
concluded there's a better than 90 percent probability that human-produced
greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have caused
much of the observed increase in Earth's temperatures over the past 50 years.
They said the rate of increase in global warming due to
these gases is very likely to be unprecedented within the past 10,000 years or
more.
Reference:
www.slate.com
http://climate.nasa.gov/causes/
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