2021 Was World's Sixth Hottest; United States' Fourth Warmest Year On Record

The only part of the world that was cooler than average was
an area of the eastern Pacific Ocean, due to La Nina, a
natural cycle in that area of oceans. 

The world experienced its sixth hottest year on record in 2021, say NOAA's Centers for Environmental Information.

Last year had a La Nina weather pattern. Such a pattern which involves a notable cooling off the waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean off the west coasts of South and Central America. 

This phenomenon tends to bring down global temperatures a bit.  Which means that 2021 scoring within the top ten warmest was quite a feat.  

Hmm. Makes you think climate change is continuing on, unabated. 

The data that just came in means that each of the last nine years is somewhere in the top 10 of warmest years in Earth's recorded history.  Also, if you're under the age of 45, you've never experienced a year that on a global basis that was cooler than the 20th century average.

The following little factoid from the Centers for Environmental Information might help explain why the past decade has been so hot:

"The annual global surface temperature has increased at an average rate of +0.14 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since 1880; however, since 1981 the average rate of increase is more than twice that rate (+0.32 degrees Fahrenheit)."

NOAA had another stat that alarmed me: 

"The upper ocean heat content, (OHC) which addresses the amount of heat stored in the 0-2,000 meters depth of the ocean, was record high in 2021, surpassing the previous record set in 2020. The seven highest OHC have all occurred in the last seven years."

The oceans act as storage for added global heating in the future.  Also, the La Nina pattern that supposedly cools the world will at some point revert to the opposite, known as El Nino.  That tends to warm the world, as a little extra of that stored heat content in the oceans is released into the atmosphere, giving a boost to global air temperatures. 

As I just wrote recently, climate change in many cases likely worsened weather disasters in 2021.  A very warm El Nino year could potentially really accelerate these weather extremes. 

By the way, December, being the fifth hottest on record, contributed to the hot 2021 globally. In December, the only land areas that were cooler than average were western Canada and a corner of northwestern Europe.   

 UNITED STATES

All of the United States averaged warmer than normal in
2021, except for the scattered white areas in the South,
which were near normal. 

Climatologists have been crunching the numbers and have just come up with this stat: The United States experienced its fourth warmest year in 2021.

The six warmest years on record in the United States have all occurred since 2012.  They've been keeping track of annual temperatures for 127 years.  

The 2021 heat was widespread.  No state had their warmest year on record, though New Hampshire and Maine had their second hottest year on record. 

Nineteen states, including Vermont, had one of their top five hottest years in this data set. Only 13 states in the Lower 48 did not have one of their top ten warmest years. 

Almost all of the Lower 48 had warmer than normal temperatures for the year. The only exceptions were a handful of places in the Southeast between Texas and Georgia, which were near normal. 

Most of those areas were ground zero for intense February cold snap that brought the coldest weather in 30 years to these areas.  That spell helped bring down the year's average a bit.