[Vision2020] Dr. Jeff Masters, 3-13-16: An Ominous Milestone: February Smashes Earth's All-Time Global Heat Record

[Ted Moffett]

Part of the article at website below copied below:
Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
------------------------------------------
February Smashes Earth's All-Time Global Heat Record by a Jaw-Dropping
Margin

By: Jeff Masters and Bob Henson , 7:46 PM GMT on March 13, 2016

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/february-smashes-earths-alltime-global-heat-record-by-a-jawdropping

On Saturday, NASA dropped a bombshell of a climate report. February 2016
has soared past all rivals as the warmest seasonally adjusted month in more
than a century of global recordkeeping. NASA’s analysis showed that
February ran 1.35°C (2.43°F) above the 1951-1980 global average for the
month, as can be seen in the list of monthly anomalies going back to 1880
<http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt>. The
previous record was set just last month, as January 2016 came in 1.14°C
above the 1951-1980 average for the month. In other words, February has
dispensed with this one-month-old record by a full 0.21°C (0.38°F)--an
extraordinary margin to beat a monthly world temperature record by. Perhaps
even more remarkable is that February 2015 crushed the previous February
record--set in 1998 during the peak atmospheric influence of the 1997-98
“super” El Niño that’s comparable in strength to the current one--by a
massive 0.47°C (0.85°F).


*An ominous milestone in our march toward an ever-warmer planet*Because
there is so much land in the Northern Hemisphere, and since land
temperatures rise and fall more sharply with the seasons than ocean
temperatures, global readings tend to average about 4°C cooler in January
and February than they do in July or August. Thus, February is not atop the
pack in terms of absolute warmest global temperature: that record was set
in July 2015 <https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201507>. The real
significance of the February record is in its departure from the seasonal
norms that people, plants, animals, and the Earth system are accustomed to
dealing with at a given time of year. Drawing from NASA’s graph of
long-term temperature trends
<http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A2.gif>, if we add 0.2°C
as a conservative estimate of the amount of human-produced warming that
occurred between the late 1800s and 1951-1980, then the February result
winds up at 1.55°C above average. If we use 0.4°C as a higher-end estimate,
then February sits at 1.75°C above average. Either way, this result is a
true shocker, and yet another reminder of the incessant long-term rise in
global temperature resulting from human-produced greenhouse gases. Averaged
on a yearly basis, global temperatures are now around 1.0°C
<http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-noaa-analyses-reveal-record-shattering-global-warm-temperatures-in-2015>
beyond where they stood in the late 19th century, when industrialization
was ramping up. Michael Mann (Pennsylvania State University) notes that the
human-induced warming is even greater
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-e-mann/how-close-are-we-to-dangerous-planetary-warming_b_8841534.html>
if you reach back to the very start of the Industrial Revolution. Making
matters worse, even if we could somehow manage to slash emissions enough to
stabilize concentrations of carbon dioxide at their current level, we are
still committed to at least 0.5°C of additional atmospheric warming as heat
stored in the ocean makes its way into the air, as recently emphasized
<http://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/perspective/19348/just-half-degree-separation>
by Jerry Meehl (National Center for Atmospheric Research). In short, we are
now hurtling at a frightening pace toward the globally agreed maximum of
2.0°C warming over pre-industrial levels.

El Niño and La Niña are responsible for many of the one-year up-and-down
spikes we see in global temperature. By spreading warm surface water across
a large swath of the tropical Pacific, El Niño allows the global oceans to
transfer heat more readily into the atmosphere. El Niño effects on global
temperature typically peak several months after the highest temperatures
occur in the Niño3.4 region of the eastern tropical Pacific. The weekly
Niño3.4 anomalies peaked in mid-November 2015 at a record +3.1°C
<http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/data/indices/wksst8110.for>, so it’s possible
that February 2016 will stand as the apex of the influence of the 2015-16
El Niño on global temperature, although the first half of March appears to
be giving February a run for its money. We can expect the next several
months to remain well above the long-term average, and it remains very
possible (though not yet certain) that 2016 will top 2015 as the warmest
year in global record-keeping.

*Lower atmosphere also sets a record in February*
Satellite-based estimates of temperature in the lowest few miles of the
atmosphere also set an impressive global record in February. Calculations
from the University of Alabama in Huntsville show that February’s reading
in the lower atmosphere marked the largest monthly anomaly
<http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_February_2016_v6.gif>
since the UAH dataset began in late 1978. UAH's Dr. Roy Spencer, who
considers himself a climate change skeptic, told Capital Weather Gang
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2016/03/01/february-was-earths-warmest-month-in-satellite-record/?sdfsdfsdfsfsdfsdfsdfsdf>
earlier this month, “There has been warming. The question is how much
warming there’s been and how does that compare to what’s expected and
what’s predicted.” The satellite readings apply to temperatures miles above
Earth’s surface, rather than what is experienced at the ground, and a
variety of adjustments and bias corrections in recent years (including an
important one just this month
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/mar/03/ted-cruzs-favorite-temperature-data-just-got-a-lot-hotter>)
have brought satellite-based readings closer to the surface-observed trends.
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