Temperatures keep rising

The new year probably won’t be the warmest on record. But the British government predicts that it will still rank among the hottest. 2017 is almost certain to be the 41st consecutive year when global temperatures are above the 20th-century average. And the U.S. government isn’t likely to do much about it.

A La Nina event has settled in, and the tropical Pacific Ocean has cooled, which means overall temperatures shouldn’t be as high as they were in 2016 - which is expected to be the third year in a row to be named the hottest in recorded history. The mercury got a boost from a record-challenging El Nino event, a cyclical warming of the tropical Pacific, which dispersed heat around the globe.

The unusually warm conditions fit into a long-term trend fueled by ever-increasing greenhouse gas concentrations resulting from human activities. The past year brought some astonishing warm-weather extremes. In July, Mitribah, Kuwait, soared to a blistering 129.2 degrees, the hottest temperature ever reliably measured in the Eastern Hemisphere. In November and December, Arctic temperatures spiked 30 to 35 degrees above normal on two separate occasions.

Despite the irrefutable rise in temperatures and multiple lines of evidence pointing to humans as the dominant cause, the Trump administration’s Cabinet will probably be filled with people who doubt this science. How and whether federal agencies will report climate change data and findings is an open question. Some worried researchers have already begun to archive data out of fear that it will be taken offline. The dynamic between career researchers and politically appointed officials will be one to watch.

This story was originally published January 3, 2017 at 5:52 PM with the headline "Temperatures keep rising."