From WNYC Studios, I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Wednesday, January 11th.

For our climate story of the week, we'll look at the climate stats of the year.

Europe's Copernicus Climate Change Service,

which tracks global temperatures, reported this week that the last eight years have been the eight

hottest years on record, with 2022 being the fifth hottest year ever recorded. We'll look at some

of those numbers. Let's see what happened to the

climate in 2022 with Henry Fountain, climate change reporter for the New York Times. Hi, Henry,

thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC. Thanks for happening. So 2022 was the fifth hottest year on record,

according to Copernicus.

Can you give us some of the numbers that that ranking is based on?

Well, Copernicus, which is like basically sort of the European version of what NOAA does in the United States,

it takes temperature readings, monthly temperature readings all around the world,

takes data from other countries, et cetera, uses some modeling, some computer simulation,

and comes up with a figure.

They do it every month.

They also do it yearly.

So I think this year, the finding was it globally,

temperatures were 1.18 degrees centigrade,

which is roughly about 2.1 Fahrenheit,

higher than the late 19th century,

which is before we started pumping all this carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.

So, you know, they do this regularly.

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