The global temperature in February smashed monthly records to become the warmest month in more than a century, according to National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) report. Global surface temperatures across land and ocean in February were 1.35°C warmer than the average temperature for that month, measured from the 1951-1980 baselines.
There’s a huge jump in monthly temperatures starting last year, stomping previous records. October 2015 was the hottest October on record. November 2015 was the hottest November on record. December, January, and now February, all records, and by a wide margin.
Last month, January 2016, had the biggest monthly anomaly ever recorded at the time, at 1.14° C. February destroys that record by a full 0.2°C.
Stefan Rahmstorf, from Germany’s Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research told, ‘We are in a kind of climate emergency now.’ ‘This is really quite stunning, it’s completely unprecedented,’ he said.
Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), tweets the results of the latest study and commented: ‘normally I don’t comment on individual months (too much weather, not enough climates), but last month was special.’
Normally I don’t comment on individual months (too much weather, not enough climate), but last month was special.https://t.co/nALWMlNDcP
— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) March 12, 2016
Meteorologists Bob Henson and Dr. Jeff Masters, founder of the Weather Unground wrote, ‘NASA dropped a bombshell of a climate report. February 2016 has soared past all rivals as the warmest seasonally adjusted month in more than century of global record keeping.’