Last Decade Was Hottest Ever Recorded on Earth, New Report Confirms

 Jan Wesner Childs

Published: August 13,2020

The last decade was the hottest ever recorded on Earth, the American Meteorological Society's annual state of the climate report confirmed.

The report, released Wednesday, points out that each decade since 1980 was warmer than the one before it, making the years 2010 to 2019 the hottest since record-keeping began more than a century ago.

The document echoes previous reports that came to similar conclusions, including one by the World Meteorological Organization. Such works add to the mountain of scientific evidence that shows global warming continues to accelerate.

“I’m not at all surprised," meteorologist and climate writer Bob Henson told weather.com Thursday.

(MORE: Prominent Climate Change Scientist Konrad Steffen Dies in Greenland)

Henson, author of "The Thinking Person's Guide to Climate Change," said trends over several years are key indicators of potentially devastating long-term climate change.

"Decadal predictions are a lot more confident than year-to-year predictions," he said. "Variability clicks in when you go year to year."

Year-to-year variables include climate patterns like La Niña and El Niño, which can make individual years cooler or warmer. But overall, the trends are what tell the real story.

A construction worker stops to cool off in the water fountains at Canal Park, on July 19, 2019, in Washington D.C. during an excessive heat warning as temperatures approached triple digits.

"Regardless of the year-to-year wiggles and so forth, one thing we know is every year there’s more greenhouse gas in the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning. Even in 2020, when global emissions have dropped during the coronavirus pandemic, there’s still going to be more total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the end of the year this year than there was last year," said Henson.

"So that keeps pushing the atmosphere toward warmer conditions. In any one year, that might not pop up, but in a decade, that will."

(MORE: Fall Temperature Outlook)

Other key points from the AMS report:

-There was a record number of extreme warm days in 2019, defined as days with temperatures above the 90th percentile.

-Alpine glaciers around the world continued to lose mass due to melting for the 32nd consecutive year.

-Sea level rise set a new record for the eighth consecutive year.

-Sea surface temperatures were the second-highest on record last year, behind 2016.

-There were 14 individual weather and climate events in the U.S. in 2019 with losses in excess of $1 billion. Combined, the total losses of $45 billion were above the annual average losses between 1980 and 2019, adjusted for inflation.

The Weather Company’s primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.

The Weather Company’s primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.