Next month, the World Meteorological Organization is expected to declare 2016 the hottest year in recorded history — just as the United States prepares to inaugurate a president who questions if climate change is real.
While the election of Donald Trump has stunned the world, record warmth no longer feels surprising.
After all, the current record was set only in 2015, breaking the record set in 2014. Not including 2016, the 16 warmest years since record-keeping began in 1880 have occurred since 1998. The rising temperature is just one foreboding example of how climate change and other environmental issues rattled the world, especially the Western U.S., in 2016.
Lots of ice melted. In the spring, a study found that, by the end of this century, sea levels could rise 6 feet or more if nothing is done to reduce carbon emissions — with much of the rise attributed to the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet. By December, the focus was on the Arctic, where average sea ice had hit record lows and the mean high temperature neared 30 degrees above normal.
Drought continued in much of the West, and the federal Bureau of Reclamation did something it had never done: In August, it forecast a shortage of water on the Colorado River, which provides water to nearly 40 million people, including in California.
Trump has said he wants to “cancel” the Paris climate accord, which took legal effect in November, and that he wants to roll back environmental regulations, revive the coal industry and greatly expand oil and gas development. He named prominent climate change skeptics to top Cabinet positions, including to lead the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy.
Meanwhile, the president pressed forward with a flurry of new regulations and conservation measures, not all of which are likely to survive under his successor.
Since Election Day, the Obama administration has finalized a rule to reduce methane emissions from energy production, protected land in Montana from oil and gas production, limited gold exploration near Yellowstone National Park and, perhaps most notably, banned new offshore drilling activity in almost all of the Arctic and much of the Atlantic. This week, the president set aside more than 1.65 million acres of land in Utah and Nevada as national monuments.
There may be a bit of good news in 2017: Scientists say next year likely will not be quite as hot as 2016 because short-term factors like the El Nino weather pattern will not overlay long-term warming.