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Brandon Hina

Professor Wooten

Natural Resource Economics

29 January 2020

Climate Change Write Up

Since the 1900s there has been a rapid increase in the temperature of our planet. The data

for 2019 was released in mid-January and it became as the second hottest year ever recorded

(Hersher, 2020). The big question is whether or not this is going to be a continued pattern. In

order to answer this question, we need to look at the data. Luckily, NASA and NOAA recently

released their climate change observations from 1880 to 2018. NASA recorded the land-ocean

temperature of the entire Northern Hemisphere, while NOAA focused on data within each

individual US State. This data is recorded in the measurement of “anomalies,” in degrees

Celsius. NASA describes anomalies as “how much warmer or colder it is than normal for a

particular place and time” (Schmidt & Schmunk, 2020). This “normal” is the average

temperature from 1951-1980 and is used as the fixed base period for all NASA and NOAA

anomalies. The 1951-1980 is an affective base because there were constant temperatures over 3

decades and that helps show how much temperatures are changing today. This base is recorded

as our zero line (0°C). Anomaly is the measurement chosen over an absolute temperature

because absolute values are difficult to find and generate many uncertainties (Schmidt &

Schmunk, 2020).

Line graphs are a useful way to see how much data has changed over time. However, it

would be hard to graph each month of almost 150 years of data for climate change. Due to this, I

picked a specific month and made a continuous line graph of anomalies from 1880-2018. This
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data is represented in my first graph and I decided to pick July because it is my birth month.

Looking at the graph, you can see that before the 1951-1980 base period there was only a

handful of years where anomalies were above the base period. However, after 1980 there is a

continuous linear increase in temperature. The last time the anomaly of a year in July wasn’t

above the zero line was 1992. This means that for almost 30 years, the temperature of the

Northern Hemisphere has been above what it “should be.”

One might argue that July is a very hot month and that this rise in temperature is merely a

result of coincidence. For that reason, I decided to make my second graph include every month

of every year since 1980. As we established earlier, a line graph would be way too confusing for

so much data. However, a heat map does an excellent job of representing all of this data. The

bluer the anomaly is, the lower it is than the base period. The redder the anomaly is, the higher it

is than the base period. The heat map generates the same conclusion as the July line graph. There

has been a continuous increase in the temperature after 1980. In regards to the heat map, the last

time an anomaly was recorded below the base period was in February of 1994. The highest

anomaly we saw was 1.93 °C in February of 2016. This number is significant because it is

approaching the 2.0 degrees Celsius global target limit set by the Paris Accord (Hersher, 2020).

While the data in the heat map is only representing the land-ocean of the Northern Hemisphere,

there is still cause for concern. If global warming cannot be contained under a desired target,

there will be continual rises in temperature and global catastrophes will increase.

For my third and final graph I wanted to choose a specific area in the Northern

Hemisphere and see if it was consistent with the overall data. If specific areas are not consistent

with the increase in anomalies, they may be less likely to support efforts to solve climate change.

I decided to evaluate my home state of New Jersey. From the NOAA, I extracted data from the
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annual anomalies in New Jersey from 1895-2019. I presented this data with a continuous line

graph and used the same blue and red color marks. New Jersey represented the same continuous

linear increase as the first two graphs. While there was a significant number of anomalies above

the baseline before 1950, the post 1980 data still provides strong evidence of climate change.

The last time a year recorded an anomaly below the base line was in 1996, which is consistent

with the other data. The difference with this graph was that I provided a 15-year forecast of

future anomalies, with a 95% confidence interval (gray shadow). The forecast followed the trend

of the last few decades and predicted continual increases in temperature. The average

temperature in New Jersey from 1951-1980 was 51.26 degrees Fahrenheit. If we add the 2030

anomaly forecast (3.67°F) to the 1950-1980 average, we can expect the average temperature in

New Jersey to be 54.87 degrees Fahrenheit in 10 years. With this information, it could be

assumed that New Jersey would back modifications to climate change policy.

As we discussed in class, most of the global warming that has occurred over the last 50

years is credited to human activity. The size of the world population is growing and more

greenhouse gases are being emitted. We can see the last 50 years represented in our data, as we

see a rapid increase in anomalies within this time period. This warming increases the amount of

climate and weather disasters, which can have long turn effects. In the Vox article, 2018 was one

of the hottest years ever, Umair Irfan explains how the weather disasters of 2018 created over 1

trillion dollars of damages (Irfan, 2019). A lot of these damages are the result of a rising sea

level. In one of our first lectures of class we learned that approximately 1 billion people live

within 10 km of a coastline. With sea levels rising almost 10 cm in the last 50 years, these people

are the ones being affected the worst. If temperatures continue to rise, as my forecast said they

will, even more dangerous flooding and hurricane damages will hit these coastal communities.
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References

Hersher, R. (2020, January 15). 2019 Was The 2nd-Hottest Year On Record, According To

NASA And NOAA. Retrieved January 27, 2020, from https://www.npr.org/

2020/01/15/796651503/2019-was-the-2nd-hottest-year-on-record-according-to-nasa-

and-noaa

Irfan, U. (2019, February 7). 2018 was one of the hottest years ever. Retrieved January 27, 2020,

from https://www.vox.com/2019/2/6/18214188/2018-hottest-year-record-temperature-

nasa-noaa

Schmidt, G. A., & Schmunk, R. B. (n.d.). Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). Retrieved

January 27, 2020, from https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/faq/#q101