New Delhi: The phenomenon of climate change is making its magnanimous presence felt in a larger way, every day, every month.
The way climate change and global warming are influencing the world, reports of hotter summers in the years to come doesn't exactly come as a surprise.
Loss of biodoversity, degarding ecosystem, ocean warming, melting of ice sheets, not to mention how last year was declared the warmest year in history in many countries across the globe, has the world's biggest nations pondering over effective ways to curb the phenomenon.
But this isn't even the last of it. Once again, a monthly tally of global temperatures conducted by NASA concluded that the month of April 2017 was the second hottest April on record in 137 years of modern record-keeping.
The two top April temperature anomalies have occurred during the past two years. Last month was 0.88 degrees Celsius warmer than the mean April temperature from 1951-1980.
April 2016 was the hottest on record, at 1.06 degrees Celsius warmer than the April mean temperature. April 2017's temperature was 0.18 degrees Celsius cooler than April 2016.
This past April was only slightly warmer than the third warmest April, which occurred in 2010 and was 0.87 degrees warmer than the mean.
The monthly analysis by researchers at the NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) is assembled from publicly available data acquired by about 6,300 meteorological stations around the world, ship- and buoy-based instruments measuring sea surface temperature, and Antarctic research stations.
The modern global temperature record begins around 1880 because previous observations did not cover enough of the planet.
(With PTI inputs)
