On Top of Everything Else, 2020 Has Tied For The Hottest Year on Record MARLOWE HOOD, AFP 11 JANUARY 2021 2020 has tied 2016 as the hottest year on record, the European Union's climate monitoring service said Friday, keeping Earth on a global warming fast track that could devastate large swathes of humanity.
The six years since 2015 are the six warmest ever registered, as are 20 of the last 21, evidence of a persistent and deepening trend, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) reported. Last year's record high - a soaring 1.25 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels - was all the more alarming because it came without the help of a periodic natural weather event known as an El Nino, which added up to two-tenths of a degree to the 2016 average, according NASA and Britain's Met Office.