2017 among three hottest on record

WASHINGTON — Earth last year wasn’t quite as hot as 2016’s record-shattering mark, but it ranked second or third, depending on who was counting.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the United Kingdom’s meteorological office on Thursday announced that 2017 was the third hottest year on record. At the same time, NASA and researchers from a nonprofit in Berkeley, Calif., called it the second.

The agencies slightly differ because of how much they count an overheating Arctic, where there are gaps in the data. Even so, scientists described 2017’s temperature as a clear signal of man-made global warming because it was the hottest year recorded without an El Nino weather system boosting temperatures naturally.

The global average temperature in 2017 was 58.51 degrees, which is 1.51 degrees above the 20th century average and just behind 2016 and 2015, NOAA said. Other agencies’ figures were close but not quite the same.

Earlier, European forecasters called 2017 the second hottest year, while the Japanese Meteorological Agency called it the third hottest. Two other scientific groups that use satellite, not ground, measurements split on 2017 being second or third hottest.

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