Greta Thunberg calls for 'change' as NASA declares 2020 hottest year on record

Greta Thunberg has taken to social media to call for "change" after NASA declared 2020 the hottest year on record.

The 18-year-old climate change activist wrote on Twitter: "We're in a climate emergency and the changes needed are still nowhere in sight. The only ones who can change that are us. Spread awareness. Be the change."

NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York recently discovered through its analysis that 2020 beat 2016 to become the hottest year on record by less than a tenth of a degree, the space agency revealed in a press release.

However, it is worth noting that this unit of measurement falls within NASA's scope for error, meaning that the two years are, in effect, the joint hottest on record.

Meanwhile, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) put 2020 just behind 2016 as the hottest year on record.

In the NASA press release, GISS Director Gavin Schmidt said: "The last seven years have been the warmest seven years on record, typifying the ongoing and dramatic warming trend.

"Whether one year is a record or not is not really that important - the important things are long-term trends. With these trends, and as the human impact on the climate increases, we have to expect that records will continue to be broken."

The environmental impacts of a hotter planet have the potential to be devastating.

Per the New York Times, speaking after November was declared the hottest November ever, Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus Climate Change Service (CS3), said: "These records are consistent with the long-term warming trend of the global climate.

"All policy-makers who prioritise mitigating climate risks, should see these records as alarm bells and consider more seriously than ever how to best comply with the international commitments set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement."

The Paris Agreement was designed to stop global temperatures from rising more than 1.5°C, but in 2017, Donald Trump announced that the US would be leaving the agreement.

However, Sky News reports that Joe Biden is preparing to re-enter the agreement after being sworn in as president next week.