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Rising temps, medical failures, harassers, deniers…plus those poor giraffes. :(

The Earth got even warmer.

2016 is slated to be the warmest year ever recorded, according to NOAA, beating the previous record set… last year. This GIF shows how each year's temperature has differed from the 20th-century average.

Our changing climate, driven in large part by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, will make extreme flooding, storms, and wildfires more likely in the future.

Peter Aldhous for BuzzFeed News / Via NOAA

The North Pole got above the freezing point.

The Arctic Ocean's sea ice levels are down 28% below average, the lowest ever recorded, and the North Pole has hit temperatures of about 40 degrees higher than normal — above the freezing point.

These changes are especially alarming, scientists say, because the Arctic is in its “polar night” season, when darkness lasts more than 24 hours.

NOAA

Meanwhile, Trump chose administration leaders who: deny climate change exists; want to dismantle certain science agencies; and/or support the fossil fuel industry.

President-elect Donald Trump has never been much of a science fan. In 2012, he Tweeted that global warming was invented by the Chinese. In 2014 he wrote that vaccines cause autism. And now, it seems that several people he's chosen to lead his administration are skeptical or even openly hostile of government research:

—Rick Perry, former Texas governor and Trump's pick to head the Department of Energy, said at the 2011 presidential debate that he'd get rid of the agency. The $30 billion DOE maintains the country's nuclear arsenal and is its largest funder of physics research.

—Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma's attorney general and Trump's pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency, has proposed dismantling that agency and has sued it over its Clean Power Plan. He's also a climate skeptic, writing in May that “scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.”

—Two people on Trump's EPA transition team, Christopher Horner and David Schnare, have led coal-funded organizations that have sued the EPA over its Clean Power Plan and have tried to sue universities to acquire emails of climate scientists. (Horner also denies that the Earth is getting hotter, once writing that “the atmosphere inarguably shows no appreciable warming.”)

—Rex Tillerson, Trump's choice for secretary of state, is the CEO of Exxon Mobil, the country's largest oil company and thus one of the prime contributors to global warming. (Under Tillerson's leadership, though, the company acknowledged for the first time that climate change is real.)

Drew Angerer / Getty Images

Scientists scrambled to copy scientific data from government servers, worried that Trump’s team would erase it.

Scientists at NASA collect a whole lot of data on the Earth's climate, to the tune of $2 billion a year. But Bob Walker, one of Trump's NASA advisors, told the Guardian that the agency didn't need to do this “politically correct environmental monitoring,” and should focus on space instead.

These comments, as well as Trump's cabinet nominations, sent scientists into a panic over what might happen to scientific data stored on .gov websites. In mid-December, for example, researchers at the University of Toronto held a “guerrilla archiving event” to preserve EPA data.

It's not just environmental data that researchers are worried about: They're also scrambling to download data on how people use Obamacare, which Trump has vowed to repeal.

NOAA

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