Tourists swim off a beach on Santa Cruz in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador. According to data from NASA, 2018's global temperatures were 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the mean temperature from 1951 to 1980. | Chris J. Ratcliffe/Getty Images for Lumix Environment Earth marks fourth hottest year on record as Congress opens climate hearings

The Earth posted the fourth hottest year on record in 2018, according to data released by federal scientists on Wednesday, as Democrats in the House convened to take their first, tentative steps toward addressing climate change since they took control of the chamber last month.

The new analysis by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed 2018's average surface temperatures firmly in line with the warming trends that have made the past five years the hottest since record keeping began in 1880. It was the latest data confirming the existence of climate change, which has emerged as a rallying cry for the wave of freshman Democratic lawmakers who took office pressing for a "Green New Deal" to rapidly shift the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels and transform the economy.


“The long-term trends are extremely robust,” said NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies Director Gavin Schmidt. "Our understanding of why those trends are occurring is also very robust: It’s because of the increases in greenhouse gases that we put into the atmosphere over the last 100 years.”

Democratic leadership in the House is facing rising pressure from climate advocates and progressive members of the party to act aggressively on the issue, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told reporters on Wednesday a resolution laying out the scope of the Green New Deal she has worked to craft with Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) will be released "in the next couple of days."

House Democrats' hearings come after eight years of Republican control of the chamber that saw no efforts to tackle the climate-causing pollution or prepare for rising sea levels and worsening weather disasters. And despite widespread acceptance among the U.S. population, climate change science has regularly been derided by President Donald Trump, who did not mention the issue at all during Tuesday evening's lengthy State of the Union speech.

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“With climate change, the cost of failure is existential. Failure to launch this next moonshot will result in deaths, devastation, and irreversible damage to our communities, our economy and our environment,” said Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Environment Subcommittee, at the panel's first climate hearing in six years. “This climate challenge is not beyond us. Time is running out, but it is not gone.”

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican who testified at a second climate hearing Wednesday, said climate change was driving the need for emissions cuts and to adapt to its consequences.

“If you have farmers or fishermen or resort operators or foresters in your communities and in your districts, I promise you they are worrying about climate change all the time,” Baker told the House Natural Resources Committee. “And whether it’s the greenhouse gas emission issue or the resiliency issue, they have major challenges that we should be taking seriously or we are going to put them all in very serious harm’s way over time.”

According to NASA's data, 2018's average surface temperatures were 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit — 0.83 degrees Celsius — warmer than the mean temperature from 1951 to 1980. Globally, last year's temperatures rank behind 2016 — the warmest year on record — as well as 2017 and 2015. Nine of the 10 warmest years have occurred since 2005, according to a separate study from NOAA.

Last year also brought 14 weather and climate disasters, NOAA reported, totaling around $91 billion in damages and killing at least 247 people. Both the number of events and their total cost ranked as the fourth-highest since records began in 1980, NOAA said.

Tonko said he was working on a carbon-pricing bill but anticipated it would take at least a year to put it together. In the meantime, he said Congress should address "low-hanging fruit" like adding new electric vehicle charging stations and weatherizing buildings.

Tonko and other committee Democrats welcomed the softer tone put forward by some GOP members of the panel who kept the issue off the agenda for years, and said he wanted their input on climate legislation.

“To my friends across the aisle, I implore you: Join us! We want to work together, but inaction is no longer an option," Tonko said at the hearing. "We must act on climate."

In the House Natural Resources Committee, freshman Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) said he was "excited about the opportunity to take comprehensive, holistic and significant actions to solve this issue, actions like a Green New Deal" that would rapidly transition the economy to run on carbon-free energy. "At the end of the day, I think this is the defining issue of our time," he added.

Republicans who spent the Obama administration fighting regulations to limit greenhouse gas emissions used Wednesday's hearings to attack the newly emerging approach from the Democratic left flank as too expensive, even as some portrayed themselves as eager to do something about climate change.

“Climate change is real,” Energy and Commerce ranking member Greg Walden (R-Ore.) said. “The need to protect the environment is real. The need to foster a strong U.S. economy and grow American jobs is real. And the need to prepare our communities for the future is real. The Republicans on this committee are ready and willing to have serious, solutions-oriented discussions about how to address and balance these considerations.”

Walden chaired the committee from 2017 to 2019, but he never convened a hearing devoted solely to climate change. And he voted with the rest of his party to block most of former President Barack Obama's proposed regulations to limit emissions. He said the Green New Deal “makes it more difficult to reach our shared environmental goal” and called for a “longer conversation.”

Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), ranking member of the subcommittee, similarly bashed the as-yet unreleased proposal as “wealth transfer schemes” and “radical,” while calling for exploration of innovative technologies as possible solutions.

Liberal activists said that attitude ignores the seriousness of the climate crisis. In an October report on how to avoid catastrophic climate change, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said worldwide carbon emissions would have to effectively fall to zero by mid-century to have a chance of keeping temperature increases below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Activists say that level of ambition would be impossible without strong U.S. leadership.

“Bashing the Green New Deal shows that the Republicans still aren't taking seriously the kind of massive transformation we need at the scale of the crisis," said Thanu Yakupitiyage, a spokesperson for 350 Action, an activist group that has been working on the resolution.

Senior Democrats emerged from the Energy and Commerce hearing encouraged by the perceptible tonal shift on climate science and voiced interest in pursuing bipartisan solutions, if possible.

“Shimkus, in particular, seemed to be willing to reach out and work on some climate issues,” E&C Chairman Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) told reporters. “So that was positive, I thought.”

They sounded upbeat even as they acknowledged skepticism about the new Republican openness given their last decade of hostility toward cap-and-trade legislation, international efforts like the Paris accord to address the problems, and regulations like the Clean Power Plan aimed at curbing carbon dioxide emissions.

“The things that I heard today from Republicans were pretty encouraging,” Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) told reporters. “There’s room for skepticism in every room in this building, but if we listen hard and try to come together around the facts, I think we can get something done.”