2021 was hot as hell, NASA confirms

The image is from thechorus image on thecdn.vox-cdn.com.

The photo was taken in August of 2021. The Mediterranean Sea has been hit by a heatwave.

Photo by Jonathan Borg.

The last eight years have been the hottest on record. The agencies said that the year is the sixth hottest on record. There were many red flags throughout the year to show how remarkable the year was for temperature extremes.

The director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies says the decade is likely to be the warmest in hundreds of years. There is enough change that it is having local impacts.

The local impacts in North America included terrible summer heat. The Pacific Northwest US and Western Canada were 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 The Death Valley in California could set a world record for the hottest temperature ever recorded on the planet for the second year in a row.

Europe also experienced heat. The European record for maximum temperature was set in Sicily at 119.8 degrees Fahrenheit. The World Meteorological Organization is still looking at those records. July was the hottest month on record.

The temperatures buckled roads and melted power cables.

The heat took a toll on communities. The CDC reported that emergency department visits spiked in the Pacific Northwest due to the extreme heat wave. The small town of Lytton, British Columbia, was almost wiped out by the fire after it recorded Canada's highest temperature on record. The event was one of the most shocking of the year. Even if people don't die, that's a community destroyed

Research published this week shows that the world's oceans experienced record levels of heat in 2011. Ocean heatwaves are more common now than they were in the early 1980s, and they can be devastating for marine life and coastal communities. They kill coral, take a toll on fishing and crabbing industries, and can make the weather worse.

The temperature might have been even hotter in 2021, if it wasn't for a La Nia event. La Nia is a recurring climate phenomenon that is defined by cooler-than-average waters in the eastern equatorial Pacific, which can affect weather patterns worldwide.

The European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service released its own data on global temperature records this week, which differed slightly from NASA and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. The year was the fifth warmest on record. The world has warmed by more than a degree Celsius since the preindustrial era, as a result of greenhouse gases released by burning fossil fuels. This year's heat extremes illustrate the need for a transition to clean energy because global warming needs to stay below two degrees Celsius to prevent catastrophic climate change.

We are reaping what we have sown.