November: Another Record Hot Global Month

Flowers blooming in Washington DC in
mid-December. The East Coast and
most of the rest of the world is having a
very warm end to 2015.

Cut and paste.

That's what I could have done month after month in 2015 describing how each month was the hottest on record during the year.

Add November to the list. The National Centers for Environment Information, an arm of NOAA, confirms in their monthly report that November was the world's warmest on record.

Only one other month in their records was farther above normal temperature-wise than November. That other month was October, 2015.

Nine of 11 months of 2015 have been the warmest on record.

That makes 2015 a shoo-in for the hottest year on record. Reliable records date back to the 1880s.

According to the National Centers for Environmental Information the only way 2015 would not become the hottest year on record would be if December over the globe as a whole; would have to be colder than the coldest worldwide December on record, which was 1916.

Fat chance of that, considering how hot some parts of the world have been so far in December. It's so warm daffodils are blooming in Ireland and England, cherry blossoms are out in Washington, DC, and there are dandelions blooming on my lawn in normally frigid northwestern Vermont.

As I've noted in the previous record months in 2015, El Nino has a LOT to do with this. The periodic warming of the eastern Pacific ocean releases a lot of heat into the global atmosphere, and that boosts global temperatures.

That this year's El Nino was the strongest on record only means that the heat was even hotter than it normally would have been in an El Nino year.

November, 2015, was Earth's warmest on record, says NOAA. 

And yes, global warming, caused by humans, plays a role. This year would have been abnormally warm without human-induced climate change, but with us burning fossil fuel, it makes the baseline temperature warmer, so this El Nino year is going at a record warm pace, instead of just pretty warm.

I bet it's fair to say that global temperatures will probably cool down a little bit later in 2016 and on into 2017 and 2018 asEl Nino fades away.

The climate denialists will highlight that "cooling trend" as "proof" that global warming doesn't exist.

But you gotta look at the long term trends. There will always be ups and downs in global temperature. Global temperatures are not rising at a uniform rate, because of so many other influences, like El Nino, and natural changes in oceanic and atmospheric patterns.

The general trend line is up, up, up, though.  A strong El Nino happened in 1998 and it helped make that year the world's hottest on record. For awhile, anyway.  Then came the hot years of 2005 and 2010 and 2014, and now 2015 to break that 1998 record.

It might be several years before the world sees a year hotter than 2015. But I'm still confident that year will arrive, eventually.

And while we're waiting for the 2015 hot record to be broken perhaps several years down the road, we will continue to have year after year of temperatures well above where they were several decades ago.

That will be true even if, say, 2017 is a fair amount "cooler" than 2015. A "coolish" 2017, if it happens, will almost certainly be very warm by historical standards, because of all the extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The last time the globe had a cooler than normal month was in February, 1985.  If you're under 30 years old, you've never seen a chillier than average global month.

I don't think you ever will.