2021 another exceptionally warm year
Sixth-hottest on record included new mark for December temperatures
By Emily Foxhall STAFF WRITER
Nathan Lewis, a former Westfield High School receiver, works out under a sunny sky at Collins Park in Houston last week as he prepares to go back to Coahoma Community College in Mississippi and spring football workouts.
A woman stands under a Metro bus stop awning as a torrential rain passes through downtown Houston last October. Climate science predicts that global warming will likely continue to bring more extreme heat, stronger hurricanes and heavier rains — all of which Houstonians have experienced.
Feast Bennemie, 77, wipes sweat from his face in the living room of his Fifth Ward home in Houston last June.
The past eight years have been the warmest on record, national scientists say, continuing the global trend toward hotter temperatures and underscoring expectations for more dangerous weather.
2021 ranked as the sixth-warmest year on the planet since researchers began keeping records in 1880, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found independently. (NASA declared it a tie with 2018.)
The average global temperature for the year was about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average, according to NOAA. NASA bases its comparison on a slightly different baseline but had similar findings.
These latest data sets highlight the expectations for more extreme weather and the need to prepare for it, Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said at a news conference.
Climate science predicts that global warming will likely continue to bring more extreme heat, stronger hurricanes and heavier rains — all of which Houstonians have experienced.
December saw record-breaking heat. Last weekend brought pounding rain. The summer spared the city Category 4 Hurricane Ida, which hit Louisiana.
“We’ve reached a point where the global warming data that we’re talking about here is no longer an esoteric or an academic measure of what’s going on,” Schmidt explained, “but it’s being reflected in the weather and in the events that we’re seeing.”
That 2021 was not the absolute hottest on record didn’t really matter, scientists said. (2020 still holds the tie for hottest.) The long-term view is clear: The planet is getting warmer.
How hot the oceans are and how much the glaciers and ice sheets are melting also back up that trend, said Russ Vose, chief of the analysis and synthesis branch of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.
“This is just one indicator of a world that’s warming,” Vose said of the temperature rankings.
Weather varies day to day and year to year, said Kimberley Miner, a NASA climate scientist. Climate science looks at the bigger picture.
And in this case, those trends aren’t looking good for the Earth’s future, Miner noted.
People have seen the consequences. It was important to take action.
“We do need to try to understand that if a trend is going in the wrong direction, that we have to do something about that if possible,” Miner said.
Burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil is a significant contributor to climate change. Doing so increases the concentrations of greenhouse gases.
As long as greenhouse gases are increasing, Schmidt said, temperatures will continue to rise.
“Science leaves no room for doubt,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a prepared statement. “Climate change is the existential threat of our time.” emily.foxhall@chron.com