An alternative take on our changing climate, from a leading meteorologist

Scott Duncan is social media's favourite meteorologist. Based in London, Scott primarily forecasts for energy and power markets across Europe, with a heavy focus on renewable energy. More recently, he turned his attention to improving communication of key weather and climate events to those not in the scientific community. His work has received international recognition and has gone viral on several occasions.

Plagued with exceptional heat waves and record-breaking extremes, 2021 came in as Earth’s 6th hottest year on record according to NASA). But how does 2021 compare to various decades in the past century?

In order to keep track of our warming planet, climatologists refer to an ‘average’ as a way of benchmarking the progression of global temperature. The preindustrial average (usually taken between 1850-1900) is used to track temperature change since the industrial revolution. And the global average temperature for the year 2021 was approximately +1.2°C warmer than this preindustrial average - according to Berkeley Earth.

While this preindustrial average remains very important for tracking human impact on our climate, the pre-industrial climate average may be difficult to comprehend, given that it is based on a period before our time. As the climate rapidly warms, our individual perception of ‘average’ can change. There is often public confusion around the ‘average’ global temperature in which meteorologists and climatologists refer to.

Let’s explore some of the different climate averages (often referred to as ‘baselines’) over the last century and see how they look compared to 2021, starting with the last decade.

Comparing the global average temperature of 2021 to the 10-year average of 2011-2020 yields - a map that