Earth sizzles to new high

Photo: The Canadian Press

German tourist Guido Weber uses his backpack to cover his head against the hot afternoon sun.

Earth sizzled to a third-straight record hot year in 2016, with scientists mostly blaming man-made global warming with help from a natural El Nino that's now gone.

Two U.S. agencies and international weather groups reported Wednesday that last year was the warmest on record. They measure global temperatures in slightly different ways, and came up with a range of increases, from minuscule to what top American climate scientists described as substantial.

They're "all singing the same song even if they are hitting different notes along the way. The pattern is very clear," said Deke Arndt of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

NOAA calculated that the average global temperature for 2016 was 14.84 C – beating the previous year by 0.04 degrees.

NASA's figures , which include more of the Arctic, are higher at 0.12 C warmer than 2015. The Arctic "was enormously warm, like totally off the charts compared to everything else," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York, where the space agency monitors global temperatures.

The British meteorological office determined that 2016 barely beat 2015 by 0.018 C. The World Meteorological Organization and other monitoring groups agreed that 2016 was a record, with the international weather agency chief Petteri Taalas saying "temperatures only tell part of the story" of extreme warming.

The figures are based on ground-level temperatures. Satellite calculations also showed that it was the warmest year, Schmidt said.

"This is clearly a record," he said. "We are now no longer only looking at something that only scientists can see, but is apparent to people in our daily lives."