Planet finally stops setting warmest year records; 2017 merely finishes Top 3

Enlarge / The results from NASA's dataset (showing temperature above the 1951-1980 average), which ranks 2017 as the 2nd warmest year on record. (credit: NASA)

Last year had its fair share of attention-grabbing natural disasters, so you can be forgiven for not keeping an eye on the global average temperature as the months rolled by. But NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the UK Met Office all announced their final tally today: 2017 ranks as the second or third warmest year on record, depending on which dataset you ask.

In the NASA dataset, 2017 comes in a few hundredths of a degree Celsius above third-place 2015, while NOAA puts 2015 a touch above 2017. The UK Met Office dataset also ranks 2017 in third. The datasets use slightly different methods, including different approaches to handling the polar regions, where weather stations are sparse.

It turns out that the cold weather in the eastern United States around the holiday season was not indicative of what was happening on the rest of the planet, much less for the rest of the year. President Donald Trump may have been tweeting that "we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming," but he was doing so during an exceedingly warm year.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments