BREAKING: NOAA Says January Was Ninth Consecutive Hottest Month On Record

Once again, last month the world set a record for
a hottest month on record. This time, January 2016
is the warmest January on record, says NOAA. 

The monthly, eagerly awaited NOAA climate summary for January is just out this morning, and, Surprise! Last month was the hottest January on record for the Earth.

Incredibly, it was also the ninth month in a row that was the hottest on record. As far as I can tell this is totally unprecedented.  

For the world's land and oceans, January, 2016 was 1.87 degrees above the 20th century average for the month. It surpassed the old January record by 0.29 degrees set in 2007, says NOAA's Centers for Environmental Information. 

Beating an old record by 0.29 degrees might not sound like much, but if you are looking at the entire Earth, breaking the record by that amount is a huge margin. In fact, NASA, in their own set of data, said earlier this week that January broke the record for a hottest month by the largest margin of any in their data set.

Today's NOAA data says the margin by which January broke the record is only the second greatest. THE greatest margin by which a record was broken was set a couple months ago, in December, 2015.

This January's heat was powered by the oceans, which were the hottest on record. Land-based temperature readings for January were "only" the second hottest on record.

This is ominious because its a sign that there's a lot of potential heat stored in the oceans that could, in the future, wreak even more havoc with the weather and climate.

It's true the record strong El Nino in recent months drives up both the world's average ocean temperature and air temperature. That's definitely contributing to this spate of record worldwide warmth in the past couple of years, but it certainly appears human caused global warming is a major driving factor in this, too.

Once El Nino fades, I imagine worldwide temperatures might temporarily settle back away from record setting values for awhile, but still run well above normal. Then, my guess is, in a few years, we'll start setting worldwide heat records again.

Some observers are saying that 2016 will be the hottest year on record, beating out 2015, which set the worldwide heat record by a large margin. 2015, in turn beat 2014 as the hottest year on record.

It remains to be seen if 2016 will be the hottest year on record, but it's off to a rip-roaring start in that category.