Earth warming to tipping point - May 2017 second hottest on record, reveals NASA

New Delhi: A monthly analysis of global temperatures by NASA scientists has revealed that May 2017 was the second warmest May in 137 years of modern record-keeping, indicating that our climate is changing and quickly.

Last year, scientists announced that temperatures in May 2016 were the hottest ever recorded, making “abnormal the new normal” - that means the two top May temperature anomalies have occurred during the past two years.

May 2017's temperature was 0.05 degrees Celsius cooler than May 2016. It was just 0.01 degrees Celsius warmer than the third warmest May, which occurred in 2014, NASA said in a statement.

The monthly analysis by the scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York 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.

Monthly analyses are sometimes updated when additional data becomes available, and the results are subject to change, NASA said.

Scientists in the report say it's an overall trend which continues its upward climb since the late 1970s.

(With IANS inputs)