Humans are to blame for record-breaking temperatures

Washington : It is "extremely unlikely" that 2014, 2015 and 2016 would have been the warmest consecutive years on record without the influence of human-caused climate change, says a new study.

"With climate change, this is the kind of thing we would expect to see. And without climate change, we really would not expect to see it," said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University and lead author of the new study.
Temperature records were first broken in 2014, when that year became the hottest year since global temperature records began in 1880.

These temperatures were then surpassed in 2015 and 2016, making last year the hottest year ever recorded. In 2016, the average global temperature across land and ocean surface areas was 0.94 degrees Celsius above the 20th century average of 13.9 degrees Celsius, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Combining historical temperature data and state-of-the-art climate model simulations, the the researchers found the likelihood of experiencing consecutive record-breaking global temperatures from 2014 to 2016 without the effects of human-caused climate change is no greater than 0.03 percent.