2019 Temperature Prediction: We Have A Winner!

Each January, we invite our readers to predict what the average global temperature will be during the coming year, pitting themselves against the whizzkids at the Met Office, who also make a prediction each year.

The 2018 competition saw GWPF readers emerge victorious, but this time round the boys from Exeter have done much better. They correctly predicted a slight warming, while GWPF readers tended much more to cooling, after the big El Nino of earlier years.

According to the Met Office, the global average surface temperature anomaly for 2019 was 0.736°C, which we have rounded to 0.74°C for the purposes of our competition. The Met Office overestimated warming by five hundredths of a degree, but nobody actually got it spot on. However, the nearest prediction, just 0.1°C out from the correct value, came from Stephen Davies. Congratulations Stephen; a bottle of whisky and a copy of Bernie Lewin's Searching for the Catastrophe Signal are on their way.

And if you were unlucky this year, you can always try your luck in this year's competition.