July 2016 was the hottest single month recorded since 1880

• Colonial Viper
• 8 years ago
• Categories: capitalism, climate change, Economy, energy, Environment, International

And 2016 will almost definitely be the hottest year yet

Time Magazine reports on data provided in the last day or so by both NASA and JMA.

July 2016 was the warmest month ever recorded, the latest in a slew of new temperature records set in the past several years, according to two new reports.

Scientists have recorded month after month of record-breaking temperatures this year, but July shattered all those records to become the hottest of any month in any year since record keeping began. The data was confirmed separately by NASA and the Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA), and provides near certainty that 2016 will be the hottest year in recorded history.

This comes on top of reports in July which said that the Earth had just experienced its hottest 6 months on record. Canadian media The Star even commented on NIWA reporting that NZ temperatures were running at a massive 1.4 deg C above normal, spectacularly smashing through the previous record.

Temperatures in the South Pacific nation were 1.4 C above the long-term average for the first half of the year, according to the government-funded National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research.

That’s the highest since record-keeping began more than a century ago, and significantly higher than the previous record of 1.1 C above average, reached in 1938 and again in 1999.

As a result, I question how serious the world leaders (and their advisory teams) who signed up the Paris COP21 to an “aspirational” target of limiting global warming to 1.5 deg C really are.

Now that the self applause of the UN Paris climate change conference has died down, I’ll make my views plain again. Stopping 2 deg C warming was a ship that sailed sometime around the 1980s.

And because of this thing called “thermal inertia” (i.e. a cold pot of water takes a long time to heat up, and our planet happens to be covered in very deep pots of cold water called oceans), the Earth has so far only experienced about half the total temperature increase that will result from the greenhouse gas emissions of the 1980s.

There is fully another half the warming to come from the decade of Tom Cruise’s TOP GUN movie. Next will come the warming from the emissions we put out in the 1990s. Then the warming from what we released in the 2000s. Then the 2010’s; you get the idea.

Of course, that’s not going to stop the pro-establishment loyalists in both politics and science putting on their very serious faces to talk on TV about how we can successfully limit global warming to 1.5 deg C (or 2.0) deg C.