2021 Ranks Among the Five Hottest Years in History

Observations by scientists confirmed concerns that global warming brings only swings in climate instability and more frequent catastrophes.

The planet has experienced yet another record-breaking hot year, scientists say, and warn that along with temperature, the concentration of greenhouse gases, the main cause of human-induced global warming, is also increasing.

As reported by BBC News Ukraine, the last seven years have been the hottest in the entire history of observations. And 2021 took fifth place, according to European scientists monitoring climate change at the Copernicus Climate Change Service center under the EU.

Despite a cold start to the year, 2021 turned out to be among the record-holders and continued the alarming trend of the past decade, the hottest in 125,000 years.

Warming will continue due to greenhouse gases accumulated in the atmosphere and new emissions, scientists are confident. Whatever humanity does, this trend cannot be reversed in the coming decades; only its consequences can be mitigated, the World Meteorological Organization warned last year.

The Copernicus center confirmed that the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continued to increase in 2021. Both carbon dioxide and methane broke records.

Already +1.2 °C

Last year, scientists concluded that the planet is warming and that humans are the undeniable cause of global warming. Both the scientific community and politicians in many countries around the world have endorsed this conclusion.

Back in 2015, they committed in the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions so that by 2050 global average temperature rise would be kept within 1.5 °C compared to pre-industrial levels.

This ceiling will be breached 10 years earlier, already in 2040, scientists warned. The next threshold, warming of 2 °C, which threatens catastrophic consequences, will arrive by the end of this century if over the next two decades we keep polluting the sky and cutting down forests at the same pace.

In 2021, according to information released by the Copernicus center on Monday, the average annual temperature was 1.1-1.2 °C higher than in 1850-1900.

In 2021, a record volume of ice melted in Greenland, and over the past 15 years, 5 trillion tons. This is enough to raise the level of the world's oceans by several centimeters.

Climate change threatens humanity, as it brings natural disasters, mass migration, flooded cities and fields, and the bankruptcy of insurance companies and states. The death toll from global warming already runs into tens of thousands.

Natural "Seesaw"

2021 once again confirmed scientists' conclusions that global warming does not show up as cozy warmth replacing chill, but as the swinging of weather "seesaws" between cold and heat.

This is because heating the planet disrupts the cooling system and the circulation of water and air. Droughts, frosts, hurricanes, wildfires and floods will become more frequent.

In 2021, these "seesaws" were both geographical and temporal.

Hot Australia experienced its coolest year in a decade. For the first time in five years, there was no drought on the continent. Europe, on the other hand, suffered from heat during a record-warm summer of 2021.

Overall, the first five months of last year were cool for this century on the planet. However, from June through October, temperatures did not drop below fourth place in the entire history of observations.