Hottest February by far at a whopping 1.35 C above the 1951-1980 mean

While science disinformers falsely accuse scientists of fraud and dig up decades-old television claims of a climate conspiracy, the world is getting very, very hot. GISTemp has now released the results for February and they are startling, even for an El Nino year.

Below is a chart of annual mean surface temperature anomaly, on which I've added the anomaly for last month:

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature, anomaly from the 1951-1980 mean. The chart also shows the anomaly for February 2016. Data source: GISS NASA

Last month, February, the global mean surface temperature was a whopping 1.35 °C (2.43 °F) above the 1951-1980 mean. That smashes previous records, and is the hottest February on record by 0.47 °C. The previous hottest February's were in 1998 at 0.88 °C and 2015 at 0.87 °C.

It's also the highest ever anomaly for any month,with the previous highest anomaly being the previous month, January 2016, when the temperature was 1.14 °C above the 1951-1980 mean. There've now been five "hottest months on record" in a row, starting in October last year.

More than 2 degrees of warming

According to Professor Michael Mann's estimate, February brings us to the danger mark of 2 degrees hotter than pre-industrial temperatures.

Yes, Feb 2016 saw 2C warmer-than-preindustrial "dangerous" warming: https://t.co/ydpf4axJlQ

— Michael E. Mann (@MichaelEMann) March 13, 2016

El Niño years comparison

I've updated the chart for El Niño years, too. I had to expand the y axis a lot to fit the February data:

Figure 2 | Global mean surface temperature for El Nino years. Data source: GISS NASA

The shaded area is the normal period for an El Niño.

Where is the heat happening? It's not the equatorial Pacific

It's more than El Niño that's causing the extra heat. Below is a map showing just where it's getting so hot. It's the northern hemisphere, including the Arctic, parts of the USA and Canada, and much of northern Europe:

Figure 3 | Map showing mean surface temperature, anomalies for February, from the 1951-1980 mean. Source: GISS NASA

February comparisons

Look, it's too soon to post any year to date temperatures, but here's a chart showing just the months of February:

Figure 4 | Global mean surface temperature, anomaly from the 1951-1980 mean for the month of February only. Data source: GISS NASA

Year to date comparisons

As I said, it's too soon to start the year-to-date charts, but I will anyway. Here is the chart to the end of 2015:

Figure 5 | Global mean surface temperature, progressive year to date to the end of 2015. Data source: GISS NASA

For this year, I'll have to extend the y axis a whole lot. Here's a taste. The lines represent the running average. The end point marked 2016 is the average of January and February anomalies this year:

Figure 6 | Global mean surface temperature, progressive year to date to February 2016. Data source. GISS NASA

Tedious Tisdale has diverged from reality

Over at WUWT, Bob Tisdale has written an article showing how hot it is getting (archived here). Yet in it he continues to repeat his ludicrous claim:

It’s very hard to overlook the fact that, over the past decade, climate models are simulating way too much warming and are diverging rapidly from reality.

Here is a chart of monthly anomalies (against the 1951-1980 mean) comparing observations with the multi-model mean from CMIP5 RCP8.5 (the worst pathway). It shows that Bob Tisdale is so used to spouting nonsense that he no longer knows how to tell the truth:

Figure 7 | Monthly global mean surface temperature,to February 2016, observed and modeled. Data sources. GISS NASA and KNMI Climate Explorer for CMIP5

Not only that, but for the period from around 2005 onwards, the climate models overstate the forcings. They used estimates that meant that the models were overestimating what the warming would be. Below is a chart showing the models vs observations using actual forcings instead of estimated:

Figure 8 | Global mean surface temperature and CMIP5. The CMIP5 multi-model mean has been updated with recent forcings and GISTemp data includes 2015 observations. Source: Stefan Rahmstorf, updated fromMann15 article in Nature's Scientific Reports.

From the WUWT comments

It's surprising that Anthony Watts allowed an article showing how hot the world is getting, even one as full of nonsense as Bob Tisdale's. There aren't a lot of comments so far. Maybe deniers are stunned into silence. That would be a first!

Luke started the ball rolling:

March 12, 2016 at 4:19 pm
It looks like the “pause” is officially over.

All anyone else could come up with was no better than this dumb comment from conspiracy theorist Rud Istvan. ristvan wrote:

March 12, 2016 at 4:25 pm
Knowing something about statistics, there are only two plausible interpretations of your figures 1-5. 1.We are all going to die very soon of CAGW, worse than warmunists thought!!!. 2. Nino heat Burps get compensated. My money is on not panicking over an El Nino ‘burp’. Time will tell.
Thanks for the update, either way.:

Except the burp wasn't from the equatorial Pacific, it was from higher latitudes in the northern hemisphere.  Some of that could have been hot air moving north - I'll wait to see what the experts say.