Yes, if you would extrapolate the global temperature “trend” line from early 2015 to early 2016, you would look at a 20 degrees Celsius warming over the century.

March broke the record of all Marches. February broke the record of all Februaries. January broke the record of Januaries. And if April too would break the record of all recorded Aprils before – then we would have 12 such monthly temperature records in a uninterrupted row(!!)

In NOAA’s global temperature dataset March 2016 was not only the ‘hottest month’ ever recorded, but also the 11^th consecutive montly temperature record. Just one more to go, and we would have a full year. No one saw that coming, we presume. Graph by Stephan Okhuijsen, Datagraver.com.

Shown above are the monthly temperature deviations graphed from the global temperature dataset of NOAA. NOAA agrees with JMA in its conclusion that March 2016 was the number one ‘hottest month’ ever recorded, globally, followed by February 2016 (2^nd), January 2016 (3^rd) and December 2015 (4^th). In the global temperature dataset of NASA March places second to February.

These new temperature records may not be peaks on the trend(!)

In our quest to uncover the ‘Real’ Global Temperature Trend these are still mere observations. Observational temperatures do not show the real height of the trend line, because these temperatures are still being masked by aerosol albedo cooling and global dimming (which are both short-lived and will fade compared to the underlying actual CO2 warming (atmospheric CO2 of course is more or less cumulative)) and thermal inertia of Earth’s climate system (a delay in CO2’s measurable warming effect of some 35-40 years).

We will get to it all in our next updates!

© Rolf Schuttenhelm | www.bitsofscience.org