Do your recent weather memories include an unnaturally high number of heat waves, droughts, and record-breaking temperatures? It wasn’t just your imagination: 2014 was one of the hottest years experienced by nearly everyone currently living on the planet.
The many records set in 2014 included land temperatures, ocean temperatures, sea levels, and greenhouse gas levels, according to the State of the Climate 2014 report, which was published this week in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. These indicators and many others continue to prove that the planet is warming, the study concludes.
The report’s data comes from 413 independent scientists in 58 countries and is compiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Since the organisation has been compiling the same data from the same places for 25 years, it can definitely see some clear trends, says Thomas R. Karl, director of NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information:
“This report represents data from around the globe, from hundreds of scientists and gives us a picture of what happened in 2014. The variety of indicators shows us how our climate is changing, not just in temperature but from the depths of the oceans to the outer atmosphere"