2020 is on the way to being the hottest year in history

It’s been a super year in a lot of ways, and with just a few weeks left, 2020 is likely to be titled the hottest year on record.

Previously, 2016 held that title-and global warming records are getting broken faster and faster. Before 2016, 2015 had the title, and previous to that it was 2010.【小题1】But, unfortunately, this is the reality we live in: the climate is warming at an alarming rate, and we’re doing little to slow it down.

【小题2】To be more exact, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) gives it a 46 percent chance of being the second hottest year on record. 【小题3】

It was actually expected to be a cooler year. A strong La Nina weather pattern was in place, which has brought down the temperature of the eastern and central parts of the Pacific Ocean.【小题4】As a result, the planet as a whole has still ended up way too warm. In fact, it was the warmest the oceans have ever been during such a strong La Nina.

All in all, we’ll have to wait until January to know for sure where this year lands in the record books. 【小题5】.

Greenland lost a record amount of ice during an extra warm 2019, with the melt massive (巨大的) enough to cover California in more than 4 feet of water, a new study said.

After two years when summer ice melt had been the smallest, the summer of 2019 broke all records with 586 billion tons of ice melting, according to a report. The loss is far more than the yearly average of 259 billion tons of ice since 2003, and it easily breaks the previous record of 511 billion tons in 2012.

“Not only is the Greenland ice sheet melting, but it’s melting at a faster and faster pace,” said study lead author Ingo Sasgen, a geoscientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. The study also showed that there were many years in the 20th century when Greenland actually gained ice. The Greenland melt in 2019 added 0.06 inches to global sea level rise. That sounds like a tiny amount, but “in our world it’s huge — that’s astonishing,” said study coauthor Alex Gardner, a nice scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge. With more water from other melting ice sheets and glaciers (冰川), the ocean expands and that translates into slowly rising sea levels, coastal flooding and other problems.

Though general ice-melt records in Greenland go back to 1948，scientists began making more precise records in 2003, using NASA satellites to measure the gravity of the ice sheets. It’s like put-ting the ice on a scale and weighing it as water flows off, Gardner said.

In 2017 and 2018, cooler Arctic air flowed from the open ocean into Greenland, which made the melt less severe. Several other scientists said Sasgen’s study made sense. “The fact that 2019 set an all-time record is very concerning,” one of them said.

Climate change really does change everything, including language.

In October, Oxford English Dictionary(OED) released an update on its language on climate change and environmental sustainability.

Some new words have been included in the dictionary. According to The Guardian, though the OED doesn’t include formulas, it has made an important exception for CO2 because it has become, in its words, so ingrained in our everyday language.

“Global heating” is also a new entry. Although people got used to using global warming, OED aid that global heating is being used more often. That’s because while global warming suggests a kind of coziness, global heating conveys “these seriousness of climate change caused by human activity and the urgent need to address it.”

Besides adding these new words, some old words about climate have been given new meanings. The phrase “climate refugee” is an example. In the 19th century, when people spoke of climate refugees, they would be describing those who had moved to a place where the climate is healthier.

But now, as climate changes and extreme weather events appear frequently, the phrase refers o the people who are forced to move in response to extreme weather or rising sea levels.

Trish Stewart, OED science editor, said the update reflects the very real sense of urgency of climate change now.

“What happens next depends on so many factors, but one thing we can be sure of is that our language will continue to develop and to tell the story,” Stewart told The Guardian.