Last January Was the Hottest Global Temperature Anomaly In Recorded History

merbs writes: NASA has released its global temperature data for January 2016, and, once again, the record for the hottest month in recorded history has been shattered. At a time when these kinds of records are broken with some regularity, it takes a particularly scorching month to raise eyebrows in the climate science community. It has to be the hottest hottest month by a pretty hot margin. Sure enough, last January did the trick: It was 1.13 C warmer than the global average of 1951-1980 (the benchmark NASA uses to measure warming trends)—in other words, a full 2F warmer than pre-1980 levels.

Comments

So?

[Areyoukiddingme]

It's just weather.

I say that with a maximum of snark, but it truly is just weather. El Niño weather, to be precise. And the inflammatory headline is the usual nonsense, contradicted by its own summary. It says recorded history began in 1951. My parents might have something to say about that.

Why do we have to put up with such bullshit reporting? Does Slashdot really make that much money off of the page views driven by irate commenters?

Because "science"

[SuperKendall]

Fairly obvious that any stable baseline is undesirable for the climate "scientists", also hence the narrow starting window as a point of consideration...

With too much or too stable data, it makes it a lot harder to rig numbers to show what you want!