TEMPERATURES may be plunging now, but 2016 was officially one of the hottest on record according to the Met Office.

Weymouth beach was packed in August as holidaymakers and residents alike took to the beach to make the most of the sunshine, with temperatures rising to 28 degrees Celsius during the Carnival.

And in July, a heatwave saw the mercury rising up past 29 degrees Celsius, with businesses reporting the sunshine had brought with it a tourism boom.

But experts at the Met Office warned that rising temperatures showed the effect human activity is having on our climate.

Global average near-surface temperatures, published by the Met Office, show that 2016 was one of the warmest two years since records began.
When viewed alongside 2015, the two years are the warmest in an annual series of figures that starts in 1850.

Scientists at the Met Office Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit produce the HadCRUT4 dataset, which is used to estimate global temperature. The global temperature series shows that 2016 was 0.77±0.1 degrees Celsius above the long-term (1961-1990) average, nominally a record since at least 1850. When compared with the 1850 to 1900 baseline – which is indicative of pre-industrial temperatures – the 2016 average global temperature anomaly was around 1.1 degrees Celsius. For comparison, 2015 was 0.76±0.1 degrees Celsius above the long-term (1961-1990) average.

Peter Stott is acting director of the Met Office Hadley Centre. He said: “The final figures confirm that 2016 was yet another extremely warm year. In the HadCRUT4 dataset the temperature for last year was very close to the year before, temperatures for 2016 exceeding those for 2015 by a small margin. 2015 was remarkable for having stood out so clearly from previous years as the warmest year since 1850 and now 2016 turns out to have been just as warm.

“A particularly strong El Niño event contributed about 0.2C to the annual average for 2016, which was about 1.1 degrees Celsius above the long term average from 1850 to 1900. However, the main contributor to warming over the last 150 years is human influence on climate from increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”

Professor Tim Osborn is the director of research at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. He said: “Multiple lines of independent evidence confirm that the planet has warmed over the last 150 years: warmer oceans, warmer land, warmer lower atmosphere and melting ice. This long-term trend is the main cause for the record warmth of 2015 and 2016, surpassing all previous years – even ones with strong El Niño events – in the HadCRUT4 global temperature record.”