Warmest March In Global Recordkeeping (wunderground.com)

Layzej quotes a report from Weather Underground: March 2016 was by far the planet's warmest March since record keeping began in 1880. In the NOAA database, March 2016 came in a full 1.22C (2.20F) warmer than the 20th-century average for March, as well as 0.32C (0.58F) above the previous record for March, set in 2010. This is a huge margin for breaking a monthly global temperature record, as they are typically broken by just a few hundredths of a degree. Global satellite-measured temperatures also found this March to be the warmest -- the sixth consecutive monthly record in the UAH satellite data set. Gavin Schmidt, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies has estimated that 2016 already has over a 99% chance of being the hottest year on record, based on the first three months alone.

Comments

Re:some questions

[Zocalo]

why is the temperature record significant?

It's just one of many data points, but many people still think "global warming" rather than the more accurate "climate change" so pointing out that it's getting warmer and warmer is a way of getting across the view that things are getting worse and that the rate of change is accellerating.

are the specific causes known and how exactly?

Known, not really. Lots of theories, many with quite a lot of supporting evidence, but nothing that can be pointed at and said "this is the way this is" with a degree of certainly like you can apply to a proven physical law. Welcome to much of science; that's just the way it is - a series of ever more accurate models that hopefully get close enough to the reality to be "good enough" for what you need to do, but quite often never actually getting there in a manner similar to Xeno's Paradox.

if the causes are known was the temperature with accuracy predicted by models when those causes were included? why not?

The current models are often insanely complex and even then simplify the reality down considerably to enable computation to occur in a reasonable timeframe; e.g. data points for a given model might now be collected and calculated on a 1km grid instead of a 10km grid a few years ago - an order of magnitude more accurate, but still with enough margin of error to miss something important, or have nature throw a curve ball through that would have needed 100m resolution for the model to catch. See above about Xeno's Paradox.

Re:Hypotheticals

[x0ra]

Existing models have failed to correctly predict "the pause", so why should we continue to trust them blindly ? They are obviously missing something...

Re:Hypotheticals

[Alioth]

There has been no pause. It only looks like "a pause" if you cherry pick an outlier warm year and ignore the trend.