The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that June was the warmest month ever in 122 years of record keeping. And around the world, we’ve had heat-breaking records for 13 straight months.
The June temperature for the contiguous U.S. was 71.8°F, or 3.3°F above the 20th century average, surpassing the previous record of 71.6°F set in 1933. The year-to-date (January-June) temperature was 50.8°F, 3.2°F above the 20th century average, making it the third warmest on record. [...]
During the first half of 2016, the U.S. experienced eight weather and climate disasters that have each met or exceeded $1 billion in damages, resulting in the loss of 30 lives and costing more than $13.1 billion in damages.
Oliver Milman at The Guardian writes:
“How much more record heat and how many more unprecedented extreme weather disasters must be witnessed before we all recognize this simple fact: climate change is real, it is human-caused, and it is already posing an extreme risk to us and the planet,” Michael Mann, a leading climatologist at Penn State University, told the Guardian. “The good news is that there is still time to act to avert the most dangerous impacts. But not a whole lot of time.” [...]
This year is almost certain to be the warmest on record globally, beating a mark set in 2014 and then again in 2015. The chances of three record-breaking years of heat without climate change induced through the burning of fossil fuels is about one in a million, according to Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and colleagues.
Meanwhile, at the National Snow & Ice Data Center, the word from the Arctic Ocean is equally disturbing. Arctic sea ice is at its lowest level in 38 years, the period of satellite surveillance of the region. As Ada Carr points out: “Compared to normal conditions, a Texas-sized slab of ice spreading across 4.63 million square miles is missing”:
June set another satellite-era record low for average sea ice extent, despite slower than average rates of ice loss. The slow rate of ice loss reflects the prevailing atmospheric pattern, with low pressure centered over the central Arctic Ocean and lower than average temperatures over the Beaufort Sea.
Arctic sea ice extent during June 2016 averaged 10.60 million square kilometers (4.09 million square miles), the lowest in the satellite record for the month. So far, March is the only month in 2016 that has not set a new record low for Arctic-wide sea ice extent (March 2016 was second lowest, just above 2015). June extent was 260,000 square kilometers (100,000 square miles) below the previous record set in 2010, and 1.36 million square kilometers (525,000 square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 long-term average.