Second hottest October on record, just above October 2016

Summary: October 2017 was the second hottest October on record. The 12 month period to October 2017 was the second hottest November to October period on record.

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for October was 0.90 °C, which is 0.18 °C less than the October 2015. October 2017 was just 0.01 °C hotter than the next hottest October in 2016.

Below is a chart of the average of 12 months to October each year. The 12 months to October 2017 averaged 0.90 °C above the 1951-1980 mean, which was 0.13 °C cooler than the 12 months to October 2016.

This makes it the second hottest September to October 12 month period on record.

August 2017 is the second hottest August on record - the #climate is changing

Summary: August 2017 was the second hottest August on record. The 12 months to August 2017 was the second hottest September to August period on record.

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for August was 0.85 °C, which is 0.14 °C less than the August 2016. August 2017 was 0.05 °C hotter than the next hottest August in 2014, which had an anomaly of 0.80 °C.

Below is a chart of the average of 12 months to August each year. The 12 months to August 2017 averaged 0.91 °C above the 1951-1980 mean, which was 0.13 °C cooler than the 12 months to August 2016.

This makes it the second hottest September to August 12 month period on record.

2017 has just had the hottest July on record!

Summary: July 2017 was the hottest July on record by just a smidgen. The 12 months to July 2017 was the second hottest August to July period on record.

Because July is the hottest month, it also makes it the hottest month ever on record. Edit: it's been pointed out to me that August last year pipped July 2016 and July 2017 as the hottest month on record.

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for July was 0.83 °C, which is 0.01 °C more than the July 2016, making July 2017 the hottest July in the record.

Below is a chart of the average of 12 months to July each year. The 12 months to July 2017 averaged 0.92 °C above the 1951-1980 mean, which was 0.11 °C cooler than the 12 months to July 2016.

This makes it the second hottest August to July 12 month period on record.

June is cooler in 2017 but still the 4th hottest June on record

Summary: June 2017 was the fourth hottest June on record. The 12 months to June 2017 was the second hottest July to June period on record.

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for June was 0.69 °C, which is 0.10 °C less than the hottest June in 2016, making June 2017 the fourth hottest June in the record. It's the hottest June in any year when there was no El Nino.

Below is a chart of the average of 12 months to June each year. The 12 months to June 2017 averaged 0.91 °C above the 1951-1980 mean, which was 0.10 °C cooler than the 12 months to June 2016.

This makes it the second hottest July to June 12 month period on record.

Anthony Watts is foxed yet again by temperature anomalies

I read the latest article from Anthony Watts at WUWT. It reminded me that he really is dumb as an ox and blind as a bat.

Now you and I know that temperatures have been going only one way - up. And it's been getting really hot these past few years. Last year was the third year in a row that was the hottest on record. This year is shaping up as possibly the second hottest.

So what does Anthony Watts do? He plunges deep into idiocy with a most ridiculous article today (archived here).

Second hottest May on record

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for May was 0.88 °C, which is 0.05 °C less than the hottest May in 2016, making May 2017 the second hottest May in the record.

Here is a chart of the average of 12 months to May each year. The 12 months to May 2017 averaged 0.91 °C above the 1951-1980 mean, which was 0.10 °C cooler than the 12 months to May 2016. This makes it the second hottest May to May 12 month period on record.

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature anomaly for the 12 months to May each year. The base period is 1951-1980. Data source: GISS NASA

(Google has just made some changes to its charting program, and has yet to iron out some of the kinks. Let me know if you see any problems. I am having trouble seeing the values to the right of the charts. Hopefully it will get fixed soon.)

Second hottest April on record

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for April was 0.88 °C, which is 0.18 °C lower than the hottest April in 2016, making April 2017 the second hottest April in the record.

Here is a chart of the average of 12 months to April each year. The 12 months to April 2017 averaged 0.91 °C above the 1951-1980 mean, which was 0.07 °C cooler than the 12 months to April 2016,. This makes it the second hottest April to April 12 month period on record.

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature anomaly for the 12 months to April each year. The base period is 1951-1980. Data source: GISS NASA

Second hottest March on record - NASA global temperature update with year to date comparison

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for March was 1.12 °C, which is 0.16 °C lower than the hottest March in 2016, making March 2017 the second hottest March in the record.

Here is a chart of the average of 12 months to March each year. The 12 months to March 2017 averaged 0.93 °C above the 1951-1980 mean and was almost identical to the 12 months to March 2016, being just 0.02 °C cooler. This makes it the second hottest April to March 12 month period on record.

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature anomaly for the 12 months to March each year. The base period is 1951-1980. Data source: GISS NASA

Second hottest February on record - is another El Niño on the way already?

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for February was 1.10 °C, which is 0.22 °C lower than the hottest February in 2016 and the second hottest February in the record.

Here is a chart of the average of 12 months to February each year. The 12 months to February 2017 averaged 0.94 °C above the 1951-1980 mean and was almost identical to the 12 months to February 2016, being just 0.01 °C hotter. This makes it the hottest March to February 12 month period on record.

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature anomaly for the 12 months to February each year. The base period is 1951-1980. Data source: GISS NASA

2016 is the hottest year on record - three in a row now

A short while ago the data showed that 2016 temperatures for the troposphere (upper air) were the highest on record. Today, we've got results for the surface, from NASA and NOAA.

You will not be surprised to know that 2016 was yet another hottest year ever recorded in the instrumental record, beating 2015 by 0.12 °C.

That's more than I expected. (2015 beat 2014 by 0.13 °C and that seemed a big jump.)

Dr Gavin Schmidt, Director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), NASA and Deke Arndt, Chief, Climate Monitoring Branch, NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina are currently giving a press conference to announce the annual average global surface temperature results and discuss the most important weather and climate events of the year.

Dave Burton wants to level the seas at WUWT

Over at WUWT, deniers are clutching at straws to continue to reject science in the face of all the "hottest evers". They really, really liked the last big El Nino in 1997-98, but they really, really dislike this current El Nino of 2015-16. It means they'll have to wait a while before they can start pointing to a drop in the surface temperature although Anthony Watts keeps jumping the gun and is excitedly telling his readers that a La Nina is just about here.

Here is some of what they got up to today, with a moan and lots of misdirection from a WUWT regular commenter called Dave Burton about another bane of deniers' existence - rising seas (archived here). But first, what's been happening...

Another low: Richard Verney's Arctic sea ice fudge at WUWT

Some of the "thoughts" of deniers at WUWT defy belief. I'm talking about a comment from WUWT regular Richard Verney today under an unusual article (for WUWT). The WUWT article was unusual because despite being posted by Anthony Watts, and despite it being a press release from a scientific organisation, and despite it being about how winter sea ice hit another record low maximum this year - there was no "claim" in the headline (archived here, latest here).  There was even a link to the NASA press release.

This is the comment that I'm talking about, from richard verney on March 29, 2016 at 1:48 am

They have satellite data going back to the early 1970s. They should use all the data, not just that post 1979, but then again the early 1970s would be inconvenient especially since the amount of ice observed today is more than in 1974.

He's wrong in his conspiracy ideation. The amount of Arctic sea ice observed today is a lot less than it was in 1974. Here are some plots of sea ice extent going back as far as the satellite era will travel.

2015 is the hottest year on record by a massive 0.13°C

Dr Gavin Schmidt, Director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), NASA and Dr Thomas Karl, Director of the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), NOAA have just given a press conference to to announce the annual average global temperature results and discuss the most important weather and climate events of the year.

You will not be surprised to know that 2015 was yet another hottest year ever recorded in the instrumental record, beating 2014 by a huge 0.13 °C. It was 1.25 °C hotter than pre-industrial. It is now 106 years since there was a "coldest year on record". (Gavin Schmidt said that 2015 would have broken the record even without the El Niño, though presumably by not as much.)

Anyone who tries to tell you it hasn't warmed since 1996, or 1997, or 1998, is dead wrong. See for yourself:

Figure 1 | Annual global mean surface temperature. Anomaly from the 1881-1910 mean. Data source: GISS NASA.

The average global temperature in 2015 was:

• 0.13 °C hotter than in 2014
• 1.33 °C hotter than the coldest year in the record (1909)
• 0,24 °C hotter than the average for 1998
• 1.25 °C hotter than pre-industrial (ballpark)

Note about the ballpark: I took the pre-industrial benchmark to be 0.3 °C cooler than 1900, from this recent article by Professor Michael Mann in Huffington Post.

El Nino, the California drought and Sierra Nevada Snow

Yesterday Anthony Watts wrote one of his rare articles about the drought in his home state of California (archived here). His headline read: "Drought buster? Up to 10 feet of snow this week for California’s Sierra Nevada". Under the headline he wrote (my emphasis):

Here is some good news for drought-stricken California; the latest forecast model output from WeatherBell suggests that the Sierra Nevada snow-pack will get a fresh dump of up to 10 feet of snow. 

He posted the chart below, with a scale up to 48 inches from the look of it, not 120 inches (though the scale doesn't indicate units). Up the top it states "Maximum 147.6 in". (Click to enlarge it).

Source: WUWT

His prediction of ten feet of snow this week struck me as rather a lot in just a few days. Not knowing how quickly snow can build up in the region I did some research. "This should hit the headlines", I thought to myself. However the only news I could find on the Sierra Nevada snowpack were about how up to "2 feet of fresh snow are expected to fall this week in the Sierra Nevada's highest points" (Associated Press in the Sacramento Bee - 3 January 2015). That's eight feet short of Anthony's ten feet prediction.

OCO-2 baffles deniers at WUWT and prompts more conspiracy theories

The OCO-2 project at NASA has a video showing the changes in atmospheric CO2 over a year or so, as measured by the OCO-2 satellite, which was launched last year. NASA put out a press release a few days ago:

"We can already clearly see patterns of seasonal change and variations in carbon dioxide around the globe," said Annmarie Eldering, OCO-2 deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "Far more subtle features are expected to emerge over time."...

...Through most of OCO-2's first year in space, the mission team was busy calibrating its science instrument, learning how to process its massive amount of data, and delivering data products to NASA's Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES-DISC) in Greenbelt, Maryland, for distribution to the world’s science community.

Scientists are comparing OCO-2 data to ground-based measurements to validate the satellite data and tie it to internationally accepted standards for accuracy and precision. 

CO2 is a well-mixed greenhouse gas. Notice the legend - it spans just 15 parts per million by volume, from 390 to 405 ppmv. And I don't think the colours hit the extremes at any point during the year (you can check for yourself). It gets drawn down into plants on land and in the ocean and then released again as the seasons change.

Satellites rule in deniersville, except when sea levels are rising

Science deniers at WUWT are a funny lot. Their sole purpose in visiting denier blogs seems to be to sing the refrain "it's not happening", with the occasional faint chorus of "if it is it's not bad". WUWT deniers in the main haven't got quite as far as "if it is bad, there's nothing we can do about it".

Some of Anthony Watts' guest articles are good illustrations of that. There was a "guest essay" by David Middleton  yesterday (archived here) about a press release on the NASA website about how quickly sea levels may rise.  The press release was consistent with other recent estimates that seas will probably have risen by a metre or more by the end of this century or early the next, particularly if we stay on our current emissions trajectory (and maybe even if we don't).

David Middleton, who you might recall thinks all lizards are the same, wanted to reject the NASA article outright, claiming that "The only way sea level rise could approach the high end of the IPCC range is if it exponentially accelerates…". And he drew a chart with an exponential curve. Having made that wrong statement and putting up his exponential chart, he then drew a wrong conclusion, writing: "The rate from 2081-2100 would have to average 20 mm per year, twice that of the Holocene Transgression. This is only possible in bad science fiction movies."

One major flaw in David's argument was that he assumed that seas would rise according to some smooth chart, either linearly or exponentially. What he failed to factor in was that the main contribution to sea level over coming decades will be from melting ice. Another major flaw was that he himself used data and referenced a paper that showed that seas have risen at more than double his "impossible" rate in the relatively recent past.

Anthony Watts denies volcanic forcing

In another fit of Dunning-Krugeritis, conspiracy blogger Anthony Watts is touting Wondering Willis Eschenbach as an expert on volcanoes and climate. Sheesh.  He has picked up a cutesy intro to his copy and pastes of press releases, inserting the words "maybe they should have" in under his "claim" headlines. He's done this for three of his most recent articles. This time (archived here) it was:

Claim: NASA simulation indicates ancient flood volcanoes could have altered climate
From NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER and the “maybe they should have checked with Willis first” department comes this modeling claim: 

Rather than scientific experts asking Willis anything, Willis should be reading more science before putting digits to keyboards. Willis wrote an article a couple of weeks ago in which he was using volcanic eruptions to argue that the climate is self-correcting. He got it mostly wrong as usual. Perhaps an article for another day. (Among other errors, Willis confused forcings and feedbacks.) About the only things his article (archived here) had in common with this new paper were the words "climate" and "volcano" - proving (yet again) that:

• Anthony doesn't read the press releases he copies and pastes, or if he does he doesn't understand them
• Anthony Watts doesn't understand his blog articles from his "guest" essayists (that is, the freeby articles written by his fans), and probably doesn't read them
• Willis Eschenbach once got one thing right: even if Anthony had a year to digest the articles he posts on his blog, he wouldn't be able to tell if it was pseudo-science crap or the real thing
• Anthony Watts promotes fake experts (the No. 1 Telltale Technique of climate science denial).

Bob Tisdale is confused, miffed and bewildered by record hot seas at WUWT

Update - see below - plus there's also an addendum with a map showing all the places which broke new heat records in 2014.


The record heat is causing much confusion at WUWT. Bob Tisdale in the comments invited me to write an article about his latest protest at the record hot 2014 (archived here). Well, not exactly invited, what he suggested was that rooter come here to make his points about Bob Tisdales article - twice - here and here. (Both times he finished in passive-aggressive fashion in the style of Willis Eschenbach, writing through gritted teeth "have a good day" after calling rooter a "troll".

Confirmed - 2014 was the hottest year on record

NOAA and NASA have jointly confirmed 2014 as the hottest year on record. Here is the chart of GISTemp, including the latest data for December 2014:

December came in at 0.72°C, the second hottest December on record. 2006 (0.74°C), was the hottest. The previous second warmest was 2003 (which was 0.71C).  (Corrected from earlier version h/t Jim Milks). The previous hottest calendar years were 2005 at 0.65°C and 2010 at 0.66°C above the 1951-2010 mean. This year was 0.68°C above that mean, despite there being no (official) El Nino.

Andrew Freedman reported that "There is less than a 1-in-27 million chance that Earth's record hot streak is natural". Nature News has a report about the hottest year, as does Justin Gillis of the New York Times, and Chris Mooney at the Washington Post. While the Union of Concerned Scientists pinched my line about how 65% of people living today have never ever experienced a year where the global average temperature is less than the twentieth century average.

Here's a video from NASA showing how Earth has warmed since 1880 :

You can read the NOAA global report here. Some highlights:

• During 2014, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.24°F (0.69°C) above the 20th century average. This was the highest among all 135 years in the 1880–2014 record, surpassing the previous records of 2005 and 2010 by 0.07°F (0.04°C).
• Record warmth was spread around the world, including Far East Russia into western Alaska, the western United States, parts of interior South America, most of Europe stretching into northern Africa, parts of eastern and western coastal Australia, much of the northeastern Pacific around the Gulf of Alaska, the central to western equatorial Pacific, large swaths of northwestern and southeastern Atlantic, most of the Norwegian Sea, and parts of the central to southern Indian Ocean.
• During 2014, the globally-averaged land surface temperature was 1.80°F (1.00°C) above the 20th century average. This was the fourth highest among all years in the 1880–2014 record.
• During 2014, the globally-averaged sea surface temperature was 1.03°F (0.57°C) above the 20th century average. This was the highest among all years in the 1880–2014 record, surpassing the previous records of 1998 and 2003 by 0.09°F (0.05°C).

If you're wondering how WUWT will handle the news, well Bob Tisdale promised an article showing how it was nothing but sunlight-fueled oceans that caused the warming, or because the oceans were hotter, or some nonsense like that. He can't or won't explain why or how this can happen when the sun isn't putting out any more energy than before. His main concern is to try to persuade anyone who'll still read his tripe that it's got nothing to do with CO2 or the greenhouse effect. His article hasn't appeared yet, but that will be the gist of it, though I expect he'll say it in many more words.

Tim Ball FAILS Carbon Cycle 101 at WUWT

I'm flat out getting a few things done before the Christmas break, so this is just a short article. It's necessary because if you read WUWT, you'll leave it scratching your head wondering how it could claim to be a climate site.

Before I begin, if anyone wants to read up on the carbon cycle, one of the best sites that describes it for the non-scientists out there, is NASA's Earth Observatory website.

NASA's OCO-2 Satellite

The topic is NASA's OCO-2 project, which was launched earlier this year. NASA gave a report at AGU. They've been collecting data since early September. I'll let the scientists tell it, if you have the time:

It takes 16 days to get a full set of global data, with a million readings a reading a day which yields tens of thousands of data points. What they have to do is determine differences of maybe only one or two parts per million (there are around 400 ppm of CO2 in the air today).

I've been wanting to write this for a few days now, and have been prompted to get a move on by one of the sillier articles from conspiracy theorising Tim Ball (archived here).