Last year was the second hottest EVER recorded

Last year was officially the second hottest year ever recorded, shocking figures reveal. 

Data from European scientists at Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) also  shows 2019 was the warmest ever in Europe, as many regions suffered heatwaves and drought.

The data confirms the worst forecasts from previous research at the end of last year, which predicted that 2019 would be either the second or third hottest on record. 

New data now reveals that the average temperature around the world was just 0.04°C lower than in 2016, which was the hottest year on record.

This was due to the once-in-a-century ‘El Nino’ phenomenon in 2016, which inflated the Earth’s average surface temperature by 0.12°C. 

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The last five years have been the hottest on record, and the period of 2010-2019 was the hottest decade since records began, C3S said.

Globally temperatures in 2019 were 0.6°C warmer than the 1981-2010 average. 

Earth’s temperature over the last five years was 1.1°C-1.2°C warmer than pre-industrial times. 

‘2019 has been another exceptionally warm year, in fact the second warmest globally in our dataset, with many of the individual months breaking records,’ said Carlo Buontempo, head of C3S.  

CO2 concentrations are now also officially the highest they have been for at least 800,000 years.

The United Nations said last year that man-made greenhouse gas emissions needed to tumble 7.6 per cent each year to 2030 in order to limit temperature rises to 1.5°C – the more ambitious cap nations signed up to in the landmark Paris climate deal.

Current pledges to cut emissions put Earth on a path of several degrees warming by the end of the century.

The first week of 2020 has seen climate-related disasters such as the fires ravaging southeastern Australia and flooding that killed dozens of people in Indonesia.

Scientists say such catastrophes will become more frequent and more intense as temperatures climb.

The UN estimates around 20 million people were displaced in 2019 due to climate-related disasters.

‘The past five years have been the warmest on record; the last decade has been the warmest on record,’ said Copernicus director Jean-Noel Thepaut.

‘These are unquestionably alarming signs.’

The Copernicus programme uses observations from a variety of satellites, weather stations and weather balloons to produce short-term global and regional climate data which can be compared against reams of historic temperature records.

Its 2019 assessment shows both exceptional levels of short-term heat and a continuation of Earth’s long-term warming.

Last year saw the most pronounced warming in Alaska and other parts of the Arctic, as well as large swathes of eastern and southern Europe, southern Africa, and Australia.

In Europe all seasons were warmer than average, with several countries registering both summer and winter temperature highs. December 2019 was 3.2C warmer than the 1981-2010 reference period, C3S said.

Australia was also three degrees hotter than historic averages in December, its Bureau of Meteorology said.