2022 Was One of Earth's Hottest Years
Planet earth "has now warmed at least 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial levels," reports the Washington Post, "and nearly every year in the past decade ranks near the top." "On Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ranked 2022 as the sixth-hottest year on record and reported that the 10 warmest have all occurred since 2010...." Twenty-eight countries set national record-high annual averages last year, including Britain, Spain, France, Germany, China and New Zealand. Despite 2022 being slightly cooler than other recent years, Berkeley Earth reported that 850 million people experienced their warmest year ever. Humans' emissions of carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases have driven this rapid warming, scientists say. "This is a big change for the planet. And that activity has increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 50 percent compared to where it was for the last few million years," Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, said in an interview. "There's often a debate between adapting to climate change and mitigating climate change. We don't have the luxury of choosing anymore. We're going to have to do both...." "Even if we get our act together and reduce our emissions dramatically, and get our emissions all the way down to zero, the world isn't going to cool back down for many centuries, it's just going to stop warming," he said. "For better or worse, this is normal and it's our job to keep something worse from becoming the new normal past this." Hausfather also told the Post that without La Niña cooling the Pacific ocean, 2022 would have been the second-warmest year on record, behind 2020. Other stats from the article about 2022: Parts of Antarctica's ice sheet were as much as 70 degrees above normal.China suffered its worst recorded drought ever.Europe experienced its worst drought in 500 years.America had its third-driest year, and in late October 63% of America was experiencing drought conditions — a 10-year high."Blistering temperatures in India and Pakistan spanning from March to May were so high that pavement buckled."
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