According to the World Meteorological Organization, the global warming should continue because of the recording levels of greenhouse gases present in the atmosphere.
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The climate change does not offer any real respite. Although global average temperatures have temporarily dropped last year, 2021 remains one of the hottest seven years ever recorded. The last seven years are all part of this fatal ranking, according to the final assessment of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), published Wednesday, January 19. The global warming is expected to continue, warns the UN agency, because of the recording levels of greenhouse gases present in the atmosphere, due to human activities and in particular the combustion of fossil energy (coal, oil and gas).
This situation is all the more exceptional as 2021 has been marked by two episodes of the Niña, a cooling of surface water in the center and the east of the equatorial Pacific which decreases the global temperature of the planet. “The year 2021 was warmer than those who suffered the influence of La Niña in a recent past,” says WMO Secretary, Petteri Taalas, specifying that the long-term heating of human origin is now “much more marked” than variability caused by natural climatic factors.
EN 2021, the average temperature on the planet was about 1.1 ° C. at the pre-industrial era (1850-1900). This value exceeds 1 ° C the pre-industrial levels for the seventh consecutive year. Since the 1980s, each decade has been warmer than the previous one.
Synthesis of six international datasets
To establish the temperature assessment, the WMO proceeds to the synthesis of six international datasets, such as NASA, the British High Office or the COPERNICUS European Climate Change Monitoring Service. Copernicus ranked 2021 as the fifth year’s fifth ever registered, very slightly in 2015 and 2018. The US administration for the oceans and atmosphere and Berkeley Earth placed it in sixth position, the British sixth ex. iequo and the Seventh Meteorological Service.
In the end, the WMO could not set a global ranking for 2021 because the slight differences between the datasets “are in the margin of error of the calculation of the average global temperature”, indicates the agency. Only certainty: the year 2016, marked by an Episode El Niño of exceptional intensity – which emphasizes the warming -, remains the hottest ever recorded, to the elbow-to-elbow with 2019 and 2020.
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