Global stats guru Zack Labe, who I chatted with a few weeks ago for an upcoming video, is watching as the global temperature data sets come in for 2020.
Below, Gavin Schmidt of NASA shows how well climate models have been stacking up to actual temperatures.
“Both 2020 and 2016 have had very similar year-to-date temperatures,” Dr Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute in California, tells The Independent. “A little more or less warming in December could push us slightly above or slightly below.”
Several different research organisations across the world keep track of how global average temperatures are changing from year to year. In Europe, the UK’s Met Office Hadley Centre and EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service monitor global temperatures. In the US, it falls to Nasa, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Berkeley Earth.
–“The difference between the groups is mostly to do with how they fill in the ‘gaps’ in the Arctic,” he says.
There are gaps in our knowledge of daily temperatures in some of the most remote parts of the Arctic Ocean as a result of there being no weather stations in these locations. The various research organisations account for these gaps in slightly different ways, leading to very small differences in their global temperature datasets, says Dr Hausfather.
Oz had it’s hottest Spring and November ever. In La Nina now.
It’s scary to imagine what the leap in temperature may be like, with the next strong El Nino?