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

What the Anomaly is

[Geoffrey.landis]

How many near consecutive broken records does it take for weather extremes to no longer be called 'anomalies'?

The "anomaly" is defined as the difference in temperature from the reference baseline. Even if that difference were zero, it would still be called the temperature anomaly-- it would be an anomaly of zero.

FAQ: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/moni...

Re:YAA (Yet Another Anomaly)

[Layzej]

Part of the bias towards reporting heat records vs cold records is due to the fact that we haven't had any record cold months in over a century. The last time we had a record for the coldest month in recorded history was 1893 The last time we had a "warmest month in recorded history" was December. The prior record was October.

Re:And yet

[DNS-and-BIND]

Wow, what a cheap shot! Way to make it America's fault...again. I've got some bad news for you, and it comes from one of your own high priests. Close your eyes...this is going to hurt.

The fact is that even if every American citizen biked to work, carpooled to school, used only solar panels to power their homes, if we each planted a dozen trees, if we somehow eliminated all of our domestic greenhouse emissions, guess what â" that still wouldnâ(TM)t be enough to offset the carbon pollution coming from the rest of the world.
If all the industrial nations went down to zero emissions...it wouldnâ(TM)t be enough, not when more than 65 percent of the worldâ(TM)s carbon pollution comes from the developing world.
-- John Kerry, at the Paris summit, 2015

Re: Raw data? Methods?

[bloodstar]

Here, let me get you started... A nice climate archive to start https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-... If you want to do some validation checking you can go through all the individual stations and check the data. One place is: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data... Another if you don't trust NOAA and want the absolute rawest data: http://mesowest.utah.edu/ Some of your questions on why certain corrections were made are explained here: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/moni... And I find it incredibly sad that you think very little science has been done. That couldn't be further from the truth. Take the time to read some papers and do some of your own independent research.

Re:icehouse earth

[Geoffrey.landis]

Wow, a long comment that's mostly correct, but seems to mostly be irrelevant.

The main point-- that the Earth right now is in the middle of an ice age is indeed accurate. Earth is much cooler than it is on the average-- in fact, most of the time, Earth doesn't have frozen water at the polar caps!

And the climate was indeed much warmer (along with much higher levels of CO_2) during much of the Cretaceous. Rising CO_2 is NOT going to destroy the world-- the world has functioned just fine with higher temperatures and higher CO_2. It will adapt

The tricky part is-- we've sort of built our civilization around the climate we currently have. Flooding the seacoast, turning farmland into desert (and tundra into farmland) all these would disrupt our civilization abruptly.

Re: YAA (Yet Another Anomaly)

[Geoffrey.landis]

So what is 18 years of global temperature? I've been told its also weather since 18 years is far too short of a time to count for climate. But now 1 month counts as climate?

lols

Now, that's very peculiar. Why did you pick eighteen exactly, no more and no less? Why not, say, twenty? Why eighteen?

We should always be suspicious when some very unusual number like that gets thrown up as baseline to compare against. Some blog somewhere told you to say eighteen years. Why?

Here's the data:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist...

OK, now we can see. Yes, eighteen years ago-- 1998-- was indeed a high point-- more than one standard deviation above the trend line. (Note that anthropogenic warming isn't instead of random variation-- it is in addition to random variation.) But, if you pick 1998 exactly as the starting point-- no more, no less-- up until 2013 you could kind of squint, and say "look, no warming since 1998". Pick the year before 1998 to start the graph, and the warming trend is clear. Pick the year after 1998 to start the graph, and the warming trend is clear. But if you picked 1998 exactly, no more, no less, up until 2013 you could draw the graph and make it almost look flat.

Except, that was then. As of now, even with the high point at 1998... the overall warming trend is very obviously clear.