Last year was also one of the most expensive in disaster damages in the United States.
NASA and NOAA released their analysis of the global climate in 2018 on Wednesday, revealing that 2018 was the fourth-hottest year on record. The other four in the top five all happened in the past five years, a reminder that we’ve seen a lot of rapid warming lately. And the planet will warm further, especially since greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to rise.
Some of that heat came in the form of heat waves that took hundreds of lives. The heat also helped fuel record-breaking disasters, like the Camp Fire in California, that wiped out cities and left thousands homeless.
Wednesday’s reports (which were delayed by the government shutdown) also contained a striking animation showing how multiple research groups using different methods have come to very similar conclusions about the planet’s warming.
The more pressing question is how much these temperatures will continue to rise as we keep spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And the biggest uncertainty there is just what humanity ends up doing to mitigate its emissions.
