Earth has nine months in a row of record heat

Feb 18, 2016, 08:54

Things keep heating up.

According to data released this week by NASA, January was another record smashing month-the most anomalously warm month in 135 years of record keeping.

This comes on the heels of 2015 being the world's hottest year on record, breaking the previous record set in 2014 by 0.23 F (0.13 C), according to data collected by Climate Central.

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Even as El Niño shows its first signs of weakness, 2016 is well on its way to becoming another record-setter, raising the prospect of three back-to-back hottest years on record, which would be a record in itself.

More importantly, this was the 9th consecutive month that the monthly temperature record has been broken and the 14th consecutive month that the monthly global temperature ranked in the top three for its respective month, according to the NASA report. That's a full 2 degrees F warmer than pre-1980 levels. The past four months have seen global temperatures a centigrade higher than average. Globally, temperatures last month were 1.13 degrees Celsius-slightly over two degrees Fahrenheit-above average. It's the fourth month in a row that the global departure has been more than 1 degree Celsius, which is an incredibly significant benchmark after leaders agreed in Paris to not allow Earth's temperature to rise above 2 degrees, and 1.5 degrees if possible.

January 2016's global land and sea-surface temperatures were 0.52 degrees above the average for 1981-2010, reported Japan's Meteorological Agency. This means it's even more likely that 2016 will not just be one of the hottest years on record, but very possibly even hotter than 2015, which itself was the hottest year on record since ...

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NASA chief climate scientist Gavin Schmidt blamed the record heat mostly on man-made climate change, with an assist from El Nino.

That heat was why there was record low sea ice in the Arctic for this time of year, when sea ice grows, Blunden said. Southern Europe, Saharan Africa and northwestern South America racked up some scorcher temperatures over the record month.

Finally, it isn't just how remarkably warm January was, but where it was warm. Over the long run, warming in the Arctic has occurred about twice as fast as the rest of the globe.

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