Worldwide Hot Times In October

Another record hot global month: October, 2014  

I could have just cut and pasted the blog post I wrote a month ago about September being the hottest such month on record.

Or, I could have just cut and pasted the blog post I wrote two months ago saying August was the hottest such month on record.

But, I won't take the lazy route to tell you that October was the hottest such month on record for the entire globe, according to NOAA's Climatic Data Center.

This year has really been on a hot streak, as May, June, August, September and October were all the hottest on record. Every month except February scored in the Top 10.

It looks like November, on a global basis, won't be the hottest on record, ending the current three month "winning streak," if you can call it that, but it still will be warmer than normal, the cold wave in the United States notwithstanding.

(The United States makes up only less than two percent of the Earth's surface so it doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things when you're taking the globe's temperature.)

It now appears that chances are excellent that 2014 will be the hottest year on record for the Earth. So far, the top five hottest are, starting from hottest and going to fifth hottest are: 2010, 2005, 1998, 2013, 2003.

As I noted last month, much has been made of the apparent "pause" in global warming over the past decade. It wasn't really a pause, just a slow down in the rate at which things were warming up.

October adds a bit of evidence, along with the rest of this year, that the quote, unquote pause might be over.

New Scientist reported earlier this month that water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean are spiking, which could signal the end of a phase in which much of the earth's increasing heat was being stored in the deep oceans, rather than land.

With surface temperatures of the oceans rising sharply, especially in the Pacific, that could mean some of the extra heat will be transferred to the atmosphere. That could mean 2015 will end up hotter than 2014, and we'll have many other hot years to come.

And, no, just because it was the teens this week in North Carolina and Buffalo got a zillion feet of snow this week, (or something like that) doesn't mean global warming is a crock.

Global warming doesn't pre-empt winter. And it doesn't prevent all big cold waves. In fact, global warming could be causing extremes in both directions. More hot spells, sure, but maybe a few intense cold spells as well as the jet stream goes haywire.