Rest Of The World Baked Along WIth Us Vermonters In August

Just like every other month in recent years, August, 2018
was hot across the Globe. 

Us Vermonters have barely gotten over our hottest August on record. Meanwhile, NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information said we had company.

On the Earth overall, August, 2018 was the fifth hottest on record. Those records date back to 1880.

This August global heat means that each of the last five Augusts are in the top five toastiest on record.

There were very few cool spots to be found on Earth in August, 2018. The only areas I could find that were a bit on the cool side were far northwestern Canada and northeastern Alaska, a patch of the North Atlantic south of Greenland, a little bit of central South America, and a few scattered spots in western Australia.

Heat in August, 2018 was particularly strong in, well, Vermont and much of the rest of New England, western Europe, especially up in Scandanavia, New Zealand and South Korea.

For the summer as a whole (June 1 through August 31), the world as a whole also had its fifth warmest summer.  So far this year, the Earth is having its fourth hottest year on record. The world will likely finish out 2018 as having a year in the Top 6 warmest.

All this comes without an El Nino, which tends to warm things up on the Earth as a whole. Some indications are that an El Nino is developing, which increases the odds the hot times will continue in 2019.

This should go without saying, but the fact that almost all of the warmest years on record for the Earth have happened in the past five years, global warming is having a huge influence on the climate, overcoming even the normal cyclical highs and lows and bumps and dips we get in the Earth's temperature trends.