WHY 2016 IS SO HOT

Why is 2016 smashing heat records? January and February have both broken temperature records. Karl Mathiesen examines how much is down to El Niño versus manmade climate change

Karl Mathiesen, 4 March 2016 (The Guardian)

“…It appears January 2016 - the most abnormally hot month in history…will be comprehensively trounced once official figures come in for February…[Preliminary estimates put] February’s anomaly from the pre-industrial average between 1.15C and 1.4C…[It appears that] the northern hemisphere even slipped above the milestone 2C average for the first time in recorded history. This is the arbitrary limit above which scientists believe global temperature rise will be ‘dangerous’…The Arctic in particular experienced terrific warmth throughout the winter…[with temperatures] 30C to 35C above average…All this weirdness follows the record-smashing year of 2015, which was 0.9C above the 20th century average. This beat the previous record warmth of 2014 by 0.16C…

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"...[W]e are experiencing a particularly strong El Niño - perhaps the largest in history. But…quantifying the relative contributions of El Niño and climate change on a monthly or even annual basis cannot help to answer how fast the world is warming. Only trends over 30 years really matter…But the pile up of records we have had in the early part of this century are significant. All things being constant, record hot years should occur once every 150 years. Yet 1998, 2005, 2010, 2014 and 2015 have all been record breakers…A study published in January found that even without last year’s mammoth anomaly such a run was 600 to 130,000 times more likely to have occurred with human interference than without…” click here for more

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