Two key climate change indicators – global temperatures and Arctic sea ice extent – have broken records the first half of 2016, according to NASA analyses. Each of the first six months of 2016 set a record as the warmest respective month globally in the modern temperature record, which dates to 1880, according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies.
The six-month period from January to June was also the planet’s warmest half-year on record, with an average temperature 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the late nineteenth century. 2016 has been a record year so far for global temperatures but the record high temperatures in the Arctic over the past six months have been even more extreme, which have led to the record low sea ice extents so far this year, according to NASA.
In an interview with the New York Times, Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, attributed part of the rise in temperatures this year to El Niño, in which warming waters in the equatorial Pacific Ocean pump a lot of heat into the atmosphere. El Niño is now ending, and water temperatures in the Pacific are dropping, which should lead in 2017 to lower but still historically high temperatures.