The last four years have been the warmest four years on record, according to a new international report. In 2017, greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and global sea levels reached record highs, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Wednesday in its “State of the Climate” report. And those high temperatures are without the influence of El Niño, a climatic event that creates warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific and is capable of changing weather around the globe. The last El Niño, which spanned from 2015 to 2016, was among the strongest El Niño events since 1950, according to the NOAA. In 2017, the average CO2 concentration reached 405 parts per million, the “highest in the modern atmospheric measurement record and in ice core records dating back as far as 800,000 years,” the report notes.

Source: Huffington Post August 01, 2018 20:26 UTC