The Earth is getting hotter, and faster. NASA has summarized 131 years of temperature trends on Earth, from 1880 to 2011, in a 26-second video.
In this animation, produced by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) laboratory, red colors indicate higher-than-average temperatures during the 1951-1980 reference period, while blue indicates lower temperatures. The data come from over a thousand weather stations around the world, satellite observations of sea surface temperature and measurements taken by NASA’s Antarctic research station.
As a result, we can see that the rise in temperature accelerated in the late 1970s. Even more striking: nine of the ten warmest years on record have occurred in the last decade. Eventually, sea levels could rise by 25 m.
