The headline “warmest month on record” is getting to be so monotonous that we barely notice it. And here it is again—March 2016 was the 11th straight month of record heat.
The average global temperature across land surfaces was 2.33°C (4.19°F) above the 20th century average of 3.2°C (37.8°F), the highest March temperature on record, surpassing the previous March record set in 2008 by 0.43°C (0.77°F) and surpassing the all-time single-month record set last month by 0.02°C (0.04°F) .
In the recent past, months that crossed into record territory were often due to remarkable numbers in one part of the globe—but this March was warm almost everywhere. The Arctic? Hot. The remainder of the Northern Hemisphere? Hot. And the Southern Hemisphere? Also hot. Western Europe and parts of South America enjoyed a fairly clement month, but the rest of the globe saw temperatures that were often well above normal. In fact … here’s the bad news.
The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for March 2016 was the highest for this month in the 1880–2016 record, at 1.22°C (2.20°F) above the 20th century average of 12.7°C (54.9°F). This surpassed the previous record set in 2015 by 0.32°C / (0.58°F), and marks the highest monthly temperature departure among all 1,635 months on record, surpassing the previous all-time record set just last month by 0.01°C (0.02°F).
This wasn’t just the hottest March on record. It was the most that any month has ever diverged from normal values going back to the start of NOAA record keeping. Want to guess what month had the second highest deviation? How about the third? Here, this should help.
Overall, the nine highest monthly temperature departures in the record have all occurred in the past nine months. March 2016 also marks the 11th consecutive month a monthly global temperature record has been broken, the longest such streak in NOAA's 137 years of record keeping.
Yeah, it’s a record—like last month. Like the last nine months. That’s not boring. That’s terrifying.
This is not worrisome for what it says about millimeters of sea level rise in 2050. It’s not a “Boy, if we don’t do something, things are gonna be nutso bad in 2100” graph. You don’t have to squint to see the problem here.
We’re getting hot. We’re getting hot fast. We’re getting hot right now.
While genuine idiots are still trying to argue the point, the truth is that man-made climate change is affecting us more quickly than expected. It’s affecting us in the United States where we already have climate refugees.
It has taken well over a decade of advocating on behalf of his tribe to keep his scattered community intact as their island on Louisiana’s Gulf coast disappears under Gulf of Mexico waters, but now Chief Albert Naquin of the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw is high fiving.
That’s because the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced in January that it had awarded the state-recognized tribe $48 million to pay for a move, most likely farther north inland, making them the first community of official climate refugees in the United States.
It’s affecting Arctic regions, where Greenland is losing 8,000 tons of ice every second.
It’s affecting people everywhere who are dealing with floods, droughts, and storms stirred up by a world in transition. We’re experiencing heat right now, today, that’s unmatched in both severity and length. It’s a trend that’s not just continuing, but accelerating.
Even most climate change deniers believe that Earth experienced times of greater warmth in the past, times that often corresponded to increasing CO2 from volcanic eruptions. There clearly are, or at least were, mechanisms in Earth’s complex carbon cycle which have prevented these eruptions from totally derailing Earth’s ecosystem (though baking the ground and acidifying the ocean to the point that 83 percent of all general and 97 percent of all marine species went extinct represents a pretty good college try at knocking off the planet).
But human beings are now consistently pumping CO2 into the system at a rate more than 130 times higher than that of volcanoes. The Earth has never had to face this level of carbon injection before. The system could respond better than the models predict. It could do worse. The mechanisms we’re expecting to curb the increase may have already been overwhelmed. The two degree Celsius increase we've worried about? Check the March numbers. It’s here.
In other words—this isn’t climate change, it’s a climate emergency. And it should be treated that way.
