PLEA Network

9 November 2015, Carbon Brief, Global temperature rise set to hit 1C of warming this year, Met Office says. Scientists expect 2015 to be the first year where global annual average temperature passes 1C above pre-industrial levels. As of the end of September, global temperature is sitting at 1.02C above the 1850-1900 average, and is “expected to hold” for the rest of the year, a short Met Office report says. This is another piece of evidence of “systematic warming” of the Earth’s climate, saysDr Peter Stott, head of the climate monitoring and attribution at the Met Office Hadley Centre. The news generated some media interest, including headlines in the BBC and Guardian. It comes on the same day as the World Meteorological Organisation announced that the global average concentration of carbon dioxide surpassed 400 parts per million in spring 2015, notes the Independent. ‘Important marker’ Each year, major meteorological organisations around the world calculate the global average surface temperature. It’s just one measure of how the world is changing in response to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. These provisional figures for 2015 come from HadCRUT4, a dataset of observed global temperatures jointly put together by the UK Met Office and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. The data suggests that 2015 will reach, and surpass, 1C above pre-industrial temperatures for the first time in human history. The cross in the top right-hand corner of the chart below shows where the 2015 temperature currently sits compared to the last 150 years. Read more here