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| There were very few cool spots on Earth in 2018 which was the fourth hottest on record. |
In a way, then, it's just slightly anticlimatic, pardon the pun, that the official word is that 2018 was indeed the globe's fourth hottest year. So says NOAA's National Centers for Enviromental Information.
I say anticlimatic as a joke, but the stat is really no joke. Each of the past five years were the warmest on record. All but one of the ten hottest years have happened since 2005. (1998 was the only one outside that set.)
That's not all the bad news in the NCEI's report. There's plenty more. I'll quote them:
"During the first century of the NOAA record (1880 to 1980), a new record high temperature was set on average every 13 years; however, for the more recent period of 1981-2018, the frequency o a new record has increased to once every three years on average."
The global heat in 2018 was incredibly widespread. The only real cool spots were a parts of a good chunk of central and northeastern Canada and far north-central United States, a piece of southwestern Russia and along parts of the west coast of South America.
The news from the Arctic and Antarctic is lousy, too. The average sea ice extent in the Arctic was the second lowest on record for the period from 1979 to 2018. Only 2016 was worse. Antarctic sea ice extent was also the second lowest on record.
The year closed on a hot note. While the overall 2018 temperature was the fourth hottest, December, 2018 was globally the second hottest final month of the year. Only December, 2015 was warmer.
On top of this, NASA, Britain's Met Office and the Japanese meteorological people all agreed 2018 was the fourth hottest. That's just in case you wanted more confirmation.
If all this news doesn't signify a bad trend, I don't know what does.
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