Another month passes and another dataset gathered and interpreted by NASA scientists reinforce an alarming trend. The agency's latest monthly analysis of global temperatures has found August 2016 to be the hottest August in 136 years of record-keeping, marking the 11th consecutive month such a record has been broken.
Scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York carried out their analysis by collating data from about 6,300 meteorological stations around the world, along with instruments that track sea surface temperatures and Antarctic research stations.
August of 2014 was the previous record-holder, but the team found this year's August to be 0.16 °C warmer (0.28 °F) and tied July 2016 as the hottest month on record. It was also 0.98 °C (1.76 °F) warmer than the mean August temperature between 1951 and 1980.
With so many consecutive months of record-breaking temperatures, it follows that Earth is being subjected to above-average temperatures for sustained periods of time. The first half of 2016 was the globe's hottest six months on record. This coincided with record-breaking shrinkage of Arctic sea ice, where total coverage at the peak of melting season is now 40 percent lower than in the late 1970s.
There is climate trouble at the other end of the globe too, with atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, the main reason for the warming trend, passing the 400 parts per million (ppm) mark over the South Pole in May this year (also the hottest May on record). 350 ppm is a level experts consider safe, and the far Southern Hemisphere was the last place on the planet to be tipped over this already generous 400 ppm threshold.
"Monthly rankings, which vary by only a few hundredths of a degree, are inherently fragile," says GISS Director Gavin Schmidt. "We stress that the long-term trends are the most important for understanding the ongoing changes that are affecting our planet."
Source: NASA
"Record-breaking temperatures"; compared to what and when? Earth has been far warmer in the past.
"with atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, the main reason for the warming trend"; according to whom? Have you ever heard of the sun and the sunspot cycle? Cosmic rays? Do some research.....
"350 ppm is a level experts consider safe"; what experts? What defines "safe". We're well above that level now and I don't see people keeling over in the streets, nor Miami and New York underwater.
"We stress that the long-term trends are the most important for understanding the ongoing changes that are affecting our planet." Great, but what do you consider "long-term". At what date do you start your trend line? I can pick a lot of different dates to tell the story I want....
This article is hog-wash. I simply look forward to the day when the AGW cabal finally admits they are wrong, that we have far more to learn about Earth's climate, and we can move on to more productive endeavors.
Oh, and one last thing: your photo-shopped picture at the beginning of the article, which you guys use repeatedly in AGW articles like this one, is steam, not CO2. Please stop trying to give the impression that power stations simply belch out pollutants like there's no tomorrow; it's pretty disingenuous.
Perhaps its the distribution of the rise that is important, colder places getting warmer and warmer places not much change. Difficult to convince people of global warming when every day experiences point to the opposite!
If you common folk want an example of what global warming, i.e. what the greenhouse effect can achieve, look at Venus and Mars. Venus has a surface temperature of a smouldering 460 degrees C, because of its insanely high concentration of CO2. Temperatures on Mars in contrast can plummet to -70 degrees C at night thanks to its thin atmosphere consisting of mostly CO2. Our atmosphere retains and loses heat originating from the Sun depending on the amount of heat trapping gasses that is present.
Those are cold, hard facts. It's not one of those politicized, bullcrap points made by people with less of a layman's knowledge of the subject they are talking about.
Everybody else: Nobody really cares about your local weather. We are talking about the global climate. You should understand the scale of the problem before you comment about the solution being wrong.