Last year was warmest ever that didn't feature an El Niño, report finds

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/01/state-of-the-climate-report-noaa-2017-third-warmest

Oliver Milman in New York
Wed 1 Aug 2018 12.08 EDT

Last year was the warmest ever recorded on Earth that didn’t feature an El Niño, a periodic climatic event that warms the Pacific Ocean, according to the annual state of the climate report by 500 climate scientists from around the world, overseen by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) and released by the American Meteorological Society.
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Climate change cast a long shadow in 2017, with the planet experiencing soaring temperatures, retreating sea ice, a record high sea level, shrinking glaciers and the most destructive coral bleaching event on record.

Overall, 2017 was third warmest year on record, Noaa said, behind 2016 and 2015. Countries including Spain, Bulgaria, Mexico and Argentina all broke their annual high temperature records.

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Concentrations of planet-warming carbon dioxide continued on an upward march, reaching 405 parts per million in the atmosphere. This is 2.2ppm greater than 2016 and is the highest level discernible in modern records, as well as ice cores that show CO2 levels back as far as 800,000 years. The growth rate of CO2 has quadrupled since the early 1960s.

The consequences of this heat, which follows a string of warm years, was felt around the world in 2017.

In May of last year, ice extent in the Arctic reached its lowest maximum level in the 37-year satellite record, covering 8% less area than the long-term average. The Arctic experienced the sort of warmth that scientists say hasn’t been been present in the region for the last 2,000 years, with the some regions 3C or 4C hotter than an average recorded since 1982. Antarctic sea ice was also below average throughout 2017.

Land-based ice mirrored these reversals, with the world’s glaciers losing mass for the 38th consecutive year on record. According to the report, the total ice loss since 1980 is the equivalent to slicing 22 metres off the top of the average glacier.

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While exceptionally warm years could occur without human influence, the rapidly advancing field of climate change attribution science has made it clear the broad sweep of changes taking place on Earth would be virtually impossible without greenhouse gases emissions from human activity.

The loss of glaciers and coral reefs threaten the food and water supplies of hundreds of millions of people, while heatwaves, flooding, wildfires and increasingly powerful storms are also a severe risk to human life.

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