Yesterday NOAA released their global climate summary for August 2016. It shows that “the August temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.66°F above the 20th century average of 60.1°F. This was the highest for August in the 1880–2016 record, surpassing the previous record set in 2015 by 0.09°F. August 2016 was the highest monthly temperature departure since April 2016 and tied with September 2015 as the eighth highest monthly temperature departure among all months (1,640) on record.”
As you can imagine, a number of stories on this release have talked about the extreme warmth the earth is experiencing. Even more amazing is that this is occurring even though the recent El Niño has faded away, taking most of the unusually warm tropical Pacific Ocean conditions with it and replacing them with cooler than normal sea surface temperatures.
You can read NOAA’s report at https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/summary-info/global/201608.
Seth Borenstein, AP science writer, published this story which appears in SFGate.com among other places: https://www.sfgate.com/news/science/article/Earth-smashes-yet-another-heat-record-16th-month-9234662.php
Slate had a semi-humorous article about this at https://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/09/20/august_2016_was_the_hottest_august_on_record.html.
Eric Mack provided another summary article at Forbes.com here.
