July Was "Only" Earth's Fourth Warmest

Pretty much the only cool spots on Earth in July
were central Russia and the central United States.  

The National Climate Data Center came out with its monthly analysis of the earth's climate this time for July, and concluded it was the fourth warmest on record.    

This follows May and June, which the Data Center said were the hottest on record, so I suppose we had a cooling trend in July.

I say that facetiously, of course. July continued the strong trend of ever warmer months on earth.

There hasn't been a cooler than normal month on the Earth overall since February, 1985. And each month so far in 2014, with the exception of February, has ranked in the top four warmest on record.

Of course, different organizations have different ways of taking the Earth's temperatures, and you end up with subtle differences. Depending upon who you ask, July was actually the second warmest, fourth warmest, fifth warmest or 11th warmest.

Those differences don't matter so much, since the spread in measurements is in tiny fractions of degrees. Everybody pretty much agrees. It was hot times on Earth in July, 2014.

There were exceptions, of course.

As it's been for last year, an area of North America centered around the Great Lakes bucked the trend and was cooler than average. That's been consistently going on all year, as weather patterns have been strangely "stuck" with a big hot ridge on the West Coast, where California has had by far the hottest first seven months of any year in 2014.

There's been a corresponding big dip in the jet stream in the center of the continent which keeps bringing repeated bouts of cool air in.

The East Coast has been cool-ish all year, too. In St. Johnsbury Vermont, 2014 is so far the 9th coldest on record and the chilliest since the 1920s,  mostly because of a bitterly cold late winter and early spring.  July in the Northeastern United States had temperatures that came out pretty close to normal.

Central Russia was also chilly in July. Two countries, the United States and Russia, had some reporting stations that reported the coldest July on record, and other stations within those same countries reporting the hottest July ever reported.

So there were some extremes in those two countries. No other country had any cities that reported record cold Julys, but several topped records for hottest midsummers.

The big heat winner was Norway, which by far had its hottest month ever this July, beating the old record by 1 degree Celsius. That doesn't seem like much, but in the rare event you have a hottest ever month, the record is usually broken by a tenth or two tenths of a degree, not by a whole degree. So that was impressive.

So far, 2014 is the third hottest year on record for the Earth as a whole.

It'll be interesting to see how warm the rest of the year is.