2022 Tied for Fifth Hottest Year on Record, NASA Reveals

VIVA – 2022 was one of the hottest years in recorded history despite cooling La Nina conditions governing the tropical Pacific Ocean. This was revealed by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the European environment.

What is worse, concentrations of warming greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere reached new highs last year, while polar regions continued warming at a breakneck pace, according to new data released by the world's leading climate-monitoring agencies.

Earlier this week, NASA, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the European environment monitoring program Copernicus all released their respective assessments of climate change's progress during 2022, revealing an unabated rise in average temperatures worldwide.

Globally, 2022 was the fifth warmest year on record, according to NASA and Copernicus. NOAA places the recently concluded year in the sixth spot with a marginal difference. But some parts of the world, including western Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, China, and North-western Africa, notched their hottest 12 months in history.

All of the hottest years on record have occurred since 2010, with the past nine years the warmest "since modern record-keeping began in 1880," NASA stated in the statement.

"When you look at nine of the past 10 years, they're the warmest years in the modern record since 1880, and that's pretty alarming," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a joint NASA/NOAA news conference on Thursday (January 12), when the new data was released.

"If we don't take it seriously and have some real action to mitigate [the trend], there are going to be deadly effects across the globe," Nelson added, as quoted by Space site.

In 2022, the planet was on average about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) warmer than in the late 19th century, just 0.7 degrees F (0.4 degrees C) short of the threshold set by the global climate science community as a tipping point to avoid to prevent severe and unpredictable environmental consequences.

According to Europe's Copernicus program, 2022 was also 0.54 degrees F (0.3 degrees C) warmer than the already warm average for the 1991 to 2020 period.

"It's certainly warmer now than probably at least during the past 2,000 years, probably much longer," Russel Vose, a NOAA physical scientist, said in the news conference. "And the rate of (temperature) increase over the past 50 years has been faster than any time in the past two millennia."