For the 13th
consecutive month, May 2016 was the warmest month on record for global
temperature according
to the NOAA. Whether this was the 8th
(NASA) or the 13th consecutive month (NOAA) depends on which
data set you are looking, but none of the different observation sets indicate
significantly different patterns or trends.
It is now expected that a
moderating el Nino, which stirs up the earth’s heat energy content to put
slightly more heat into the surface areas on which measurement is concentrated,
will result in some slowing down. So it is possible that May will be the last
“record month” for the time being. What is abundantly apparent from the data of
the last two years, however, is that the underlying global temperature trend is
continuing to move inexorably upward. Comparison with peak years coinciding
with previous el Ninos (eg 1998) shows a clear and substantial increase The
“pause”, if it ever existed, is well and truly buried.
One of the hopes, promoted
inter alia by climate sceptics trying to play down climate impacts, was that we
would see some amelioration of temperature rises with CO2
concentration, due to an established physical phenomenon called the log linear
effect, in which, if CO2 were the only factor involved (ie ignoring feedbacks) the
warming impact eventually rises much more slowly than the rise in CO2 concentration.[1] To illustrate, doubling from 560 ppm to 1120
ppm might theoretically only produce the same impact as doubling from 280 ppm
(pre-industrial level) to 560 ppm. What now increasingly looks like a steady
linear increase suggests that this factor is not yet having much effect.
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