February Crushes Heat Record Set In January
Originally published on Sustainnovate.
January 2016 was the most anomalously hot month on record, going by NASA’s temperature figures — with temperatures well above those recorded previously for the month. So, how long do we have to wait to see the record broken?
No time at all, as it appears that February 2016 already beat the record — with an anomaly (over the pre-industrial average) of somewhere between 1.15° Celsius and 1.4° Celsius during the month, going by initial satellite measurements compiled by Eric Holthaus at Slate. NASA has yet to release the actual figures for February 2016.
Global temperatures since 1850 by month pic.twitter.com/DnGXX1prv4
— Ed Hawkins (@ed_hawkins) April 8, 2016
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Considering that the agreement reached at the recent COP21 climate change talks in Paris called for limiting anthropogenic warming to under 1.5° Celsius, the early figures are quite notable. It looks like we’re already nearly there.
“Even the lower part of that range is extraordinary,” commented Will Steffen, an emeritus professor of climate science at Australian National University and a councillor at Australia’s Climate Council.
Skeptical Science provides more:
It appears that on Wednesday, the northern hemisphere even slipped above the milestone 2° C average for the first time in recorded history. This is the arbitrary limit above which scientists believe global temperature rise will be “dangerous”.
The Arctic in particular experienced terrific warmth throughout the winter. Temperatures at the north pole approached 0° C (the freezing point) in late December — 30° C to 35° C above average. Mark Serreze, the director of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre, described the conditions as “absurd”.
…All this weirdness follows the record-smashing year of 2015, which was 0.9° C above the 20th century average. This beat the previous record warmth of 2014 by 0.16° C.
These tumbling temperature records are often accomplished in media reports by the caveat that we are experiencing a particularly strong El Niño — perhaps the largest in history. But should El Niño and climate change be given equal billing?
The noted Professor Michael Mann, the director of Penn State Earth System Science Center, commented on this in the following way: “A number of folks have done this, and come to the conclusion it was responsible for less than 0.1° Celsius of the anomalous warmth. In other words, we would have set an all-time global temperature record (in 2015) even without any help from El Niño.”
To give some context to these statements, the El Niño phenomenon is a recurring (every 3–6 years) change in current patterns in the Pacific Ocean that sees warm water brought to the surface of the ocean — thereby warming the air, and triggering storms, wind pattern changes, droughts, etc.
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