Jan 13, 2022: According to a report by Al Jazeera, U.S. government scientists say 2021 was the sixth warmest year on record, and they are blaming climate change.

On average, 2021 was 1.51 degrees Fahrenheit (0.84 degrees Celsius) warmer than the baseline between 1901 and 2000, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said in a report released Thursday.

A report released by the North American Space Agency (NASA) in conjunction with NOAA data has reached a similar conclusion. In its review, NASA said that 2021 was tied for the sixth warmest year. Officials from both agencies said the last eight years were the hottest and the last decade was the hottest since record-keeping began in 1880.

“Global warming is “very real. It is now, and it is affecting real people,” Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told Reuters. With intense heat in western Canada and the United States, more frequent hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean and heat waves in southern Europe, NOAA said there would be “no shortage of extremes” in 2021.

Scientists say La Nina is a climate phenomenon in the eastern Pacific that slightly cooled global temperatures more than it would have been without it.

Still, they said 2021 was the hottest La Nina year on record and that the year did not represent a cooling off of human-caused climate change but provided more of the same heat.

In the Arctic, often seen as a precursor to wider climate change, maximum sea ice levels were the seventh smallest on record. NASA reports that coverage of Arctic sea ice has dropped by about 30% since 1980, and the polar region is warming almost three times faster than the rest of the planet.

A key indicator of climate change, global warming content, reached record levels in 2021, the agencies said. Oceans absorb more than 90% of the excess heat trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere by greenhouse gases, and they affect changes in hot water climate patterns and currents.

“The scientifically interesting thing about it is that it tells us why the planet is warming up,” Schmidt said. “It’s getting warmer because of our effects on the concentration of greenhouse gases.”

For their 2022 outlook, scientists said they expect another year of rising heat. Russ Vose, chief analyst at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, told reporters on Thursday that “There is a 10 percent change 2022 will rank first (for heat),”

“And there’s a 99 percent chance it’ll be in the top 10.”

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