NASA: 2022 Tied for Fifth Hottest Year on Record

 NASA: 2022 Tied for Fifth Hottest Year on Record

NASA researchers reported that the past nine years have been the warmest on record since modern record keeping began in 1880.

People cool off in the water on a hot and sunny day at the beach in Barcelona, Spain, July 15, 2022.(EMILIO MORENATTI/AP-FILE)

Last year tied with 2015 as the fifth hottest year on record with human-driven greenhouse gas emissions rebounding after a short dip in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to an analysis from NASA.

“If our leaders, not only here but across the world, do not act on this scientific data, our ice sheets are going to continue to melt, our oceans will become more acidic, extreme weather will intensify,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a press conference on Thursday.

Additionally, NASA researchers reported that the past nine years have been the warmest years since modern record-keeping began in 1880. It is virtually certain that the trend will continue.

“It’s a trend that if we don't take it seriously and have some real action to mitigate it, there are going to be deadly effects across this globe,” Nelson said.

NASA’s ranking for 2022 diverges slightly from another analysis performed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which placed last year as the sixth hottest. Researchers said that the overall trend toward warming is more significant than the ranking of a single year.

The news comes after a study published this week found that ocean temperatures reached a record high in 2022.

“The inexorable climb in ocean temperatures is the inevitable outcome of Earth’s energy imbalance, primarily associated with increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases,” said the study, which was published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.

The warming trend in the ocean is “so stead and robust” that new records are being set every year.

Air temperatures, on the other hand, teeter every year but trend clearly toward warming. For example, the past eight years have been the warmest on record, according to an analysis by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service published on Tuesday. That analysis also placed 2022 as the fifth hottest year on record.

The service described 2022 as “yet another year of climate extremes,” noting deadly flooding in Pakistan due to record rainfall and prolonged heat waves across Europe.

The analysis found that the annual average temperature reached 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels last year. That number continues to inch closer to the 1.5 degree warming goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

“We're getting kind of close to that,” Russell Vose of NOAA said during Thursday’s briefing. “We've been kind of flirting with that for some years now.”

That warming is expected to continue, with 2023 seeing an “almost 100% chance” of being in the top 10 hottest years on record, Vose said.