Last month tied May 1998 as the hottest on record in the NASA dataset. More significantly, following fast on the heels of easily the hottest April — and hottest Jan-April — on record, it’s also the hottest Jan-May on record [click on figure to enlarge].Also, the combined land-surface air and sea-surface water temperature anomaly for March-April-May was 0.73°C above the 1951-1980 mean, blowing out the old record of 0.65°C set in 2002.The record temperatures we’re seeing now are especially impressive because we’ve been in “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.” It’s just hard to stop the march of manmade global warming, well, other than by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, that is.Most significantly, the 12-month global temperature grew to 0.66°C — easily the highest on record.Software engineer and former machinist mate in the US Navy Timothy Chase put together a spreadsheet using the data from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies click here. In NASA’s dataset, the 12-month running average temperature record was actually just barely set in March — and then easily set in April.Of course, there never was any global cooling — see Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira — “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.”In fact, the new 12-month record far outpaced the pre-2010 record of 0.62°C that was set in … 2007NASA’s recent draft paper reported: “We conclude that global temperature continued to rise rapidly in the past decade” and “that there has been no reduction in the global warming trend of 0.15-0.20°C/decade that began in the late 1970s.”For the record, it was the second hottest April in both satellite records UAH and RSS, which are more sensitive to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation ENSO than the land records and have biases of their own as Hansen discusses here.
Continue reading via NASA: Easily the hottest spring — and Jan-May — in temperature record « Climate Progress.
