Graph of the Day: World has warmest winter on record

[Not just the Arctic experiences the warmest winter on record – this goes for the entire globe, new NASA data show. We now have the hottest winter on record straight after the hottest summer on record.]

Just when you thought positive global monthly average temperature deviations can’t get any larger (December 2015, +1,11C) positive global monthly average temperature deviations do indeed grow larger still (January 2016, +1,13C) – as newly released NASA data show.

January 2016 is the fourth month in a row that saw world average temperatures of more than +1 degree Celsius – starting from October 2015. And just to be clear, this is not +1 since pre-industrial times, but +1 since 1951-1980 climate average – so a 1 degree temperature rise over ~50 years:

(Please lift a couple of rocks in your backyard to see if you can find any sane person that still ‘believes’ our planet is not warming. If you do, please send him or her the above graph.) Graph by Stephan Okhuijsen, Datagraver.com, based on NASA GISS data – with monthly world average deviations shown from the 1951-1980 climatic average.

The world has entered a new cluster of exceedingly hot years, ending all doubt about the trend of global average temperature rise. First 2014 broke the global temperature record of 2010, then 2015 broke that record, by a large margin.

These records are caused firstly by the end of a set of La Niña-dominant years (which obscured the global warming trend – so-called ‘temperature plateau‘) – and then amplified by the strongest El Niño on record.

After 2014 and 2015 records, 2016 set to become hotter still

Although El Niño is slowly weakening over the coming months – there is now so much extra heat stored in the surface layers of the world’s oceans, that 2016 is likely to even surpass the 2015 world temperature record. (Don’t forget where you heard it all first.)

And after the oceans carry all that heat down to their deeper waters [something we should not want – deep ocean warming triggers gas hydrate release!], the global average temperatures will still keep rising as long as we fail to stop the trend of rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations.