'Hottest year' record continues to reverberate around the world

Mark Howden.

Janette Lindesay.

It’s official: 2015 was the hottest year on record. The US-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has confirmed overnight that 2015 saw the global average temperature climbing to 0.90°C above the 20th-century average of 13.9°C. The record has been confirmed by the UK Met Office.

It’s been only a year since the record was previously broken, but 2015 stands out as an extraordinarily hot year. 2014, the previous hottest year, was 0.74°C above the global average. December 2015 marks the first time in the NOAA record a global monthly temperature anomaly has exceeded 1°C - it reached 1.11°C.

Read the piece on The Conversation  by the Professor of Climatology at the Australian National University, Janette Lindesay, and a research scientist at the Agriculture Flagship of the CSIRO, Mark Howden - “It’s official: 2015 was the hottest year ever recorded.”