Jeff Masters and Bob Henson at Wunderblog at Weather Underground have posted a stunning analysis and commentary. The headline: “February Smashes Earth's All-Time Global Heat Record by a Jaw-Dropping Margin.” Here’s what they had to say about it:
On Saturday, NASA dropped a bombshell of a climate report. February 2016 has soared past all rivals as the warmest seasonally adjusted month in more than a century of global recordkeeping. NASA’s analysis showed that February ran 1.35°C (2.43°F) above the 1951-1980 global average for the month, as can be seen in the list of monthly anomalies going back to 1880. The previous record was set just last month, as January 2016 came in 1.14°C above the 1951-1980 average for the month. In other words, February has dispensed with this one-month-old record by a full 0.21°C (0.38°F)--an extraordinary margin to beat a monthly world temperature record by. [...]
Because there is so much land in the Northern Hemisphere, and since land temperatures rise and fall more sharply with the seasons than ocean temperatures, global readings tend to average about 4°C cooler in January and February than they do in July or August. Thus, February is not atop the pack in terms of absolute warmest global temperature: that record was set in July 2015. The real significance of the February record is in its departure from the seasonal norms that people, plants, animals, and the Earth system are accustomed to dealing with at a given time of year.
Drawing from NASA’s graph of long-term temperature trends, if we add 0.2°C as a conservative estimate of the amount of human-produced warming that occurred between the late 1800s and 1951-1980, then the February result winds up at 1.55°C above average. If we use 0.4°C as a higher-end estimate, then February sits at 1.75°C above average. Either way, this result is a true shocker, and yet another reminder of the incessant long-term rise in global temperature resulting from human-produced greenhouse gases.
Stefan Rahmstorf, from Germany's Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research and a visiting professorial fellow at the University of New South Wales, told Peter Hannam at the Sydney Morning Herald: "This is really quite stunning ... it's completely unprecedented. We are in a kind of climate emergency now.” He pointed out that carbon dioxide levels last year rose planet-wide by more than three parts per million, a one-year record. Governments that pledged to cut carbon emissions at the Paris summit in December are going to have to do more, Rahmstorf said.
A lot more.
Meanwhile, all the candidates for the U.S. presidency except the two Democrats continue to hold fast to the lies about climate change spread for decades by the fossil fuel industry and its marionettes in the media, Congress and many state legislatures.
They seem to think that denying what’s happening will actually make it stop happening.