2017 among the 3 warmest years on record

The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has just announced that 2017 was the third hottest year ever recorded, after 2016 and 2015.

Last year, the UN revealed that the Arctic continued to warm at a rate twice as high as that of the rest of the world. This rapid warming has caused the temperature of the air to increase to the highest levels ever recorded, with oceanic temperatures higher than average, leading to different impacts on human beings, the oceans and ecosystems.

The general and long term trend of global warming observed since the end of the 1970s is strengthening.

Among the impacts generated are an increasing number of extreme climatic phenomena. Last year the total cost of damage caused by natural disasters reached a new record of €306 billion (€257 billion). The United States recorded 16 natural disasters with a cast exceeding a billion dollars. In Asia, a particularly severe monsoon killed 2,700 people and caused damage amounting to €3.5 billion.

Climate change will probably be higher than 0.5°C” than that forecast by the IPCC in its worst case scenarios from now to 2100.

That is the prediction of a study published in Nature on 6 December 2017 (study by Patrick Brown and Ken Caldeira, climatologists of the Carnegie Institute of Stanford University (United States).