2020 Hindsight
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Arctic and Antarctic Climate Science El Nino In the News Instrumental Record
— gavin @ 15 January 2021
Yesterday was the day that NASA, NOAA, the Hadley Centre and Berkeley Earth delivered their final assessments for temperatures in Dec 2020, and thus their annual summaries. The headline results have received a fair bit of attention in the media (NYT, WaPo, BBC, The Guardian etc.) and the conclusion that 2020 was pretty much tied with 2016 for the warmest year in the instrumental record is robust.
There is some more background here:
A bit more background on the temperature anomalies in 2020, which were statistically tied with 2016 for the warmest year in the instrumental record. pic.twitter.com/y3L6vgVnc3
— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) January 14, 2021
[Note we will work on the model-observation comparison page to add the 2020 data point to the graphs, and update the datasets to their latest versions, but nothing dramatic will change – the latest observations remain pretty much in line with what models predicted. ]
But there are a few issues that readers here might appreciate that goes beyond what usually gets reported.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2021/01/2020-hindsight/#more-23373
