Hot September Drives 2015 To Hottest Year On Record

Twelve-month moving average in temperature anomaly, measured against 1951–1980 mean °C. It may be a see-saw course, but it's riding an uphill train (source; click to enlarge).

by Gaius Publius

That global warming "pause" your climate-delayer friends have been touting, if it ever existed, is over. The news, courtesy of Joe Romm at ClimateProgress (my emphasis):

Déjà Vu Again: Hot September Drives 2015 To Hottest Year On Record

Once again, it’s the hottest year on record by far through last month, NASA reports. We’re running out of headlines for this repetitive monthly warm up, but with the recent death of the legendary Yogi Berra, one of his classic lines comes to mind, “It’s like deja-vu, all over again.”

Last month was second only to 2014 for hottest September in the NASA dataset.

With the long-term warming trend caused by human activity boosted by the short-term warming caused by the strongest El Niño since the big one of 1997-1998 — and with the current month, October, trending very warm — it’s now a better than 99 percent chance 2015 will be the hottest calendar year on record.

But the NASA data makes clear we’ve already blown past the “hottest 12 months” on record.

About that "pause":

Once again, the NASA data highlights the fact there has been no actual slowdown in warming. Indeed the March study, “Near-term acceleration in the rate of temperature change” demonstrates the only “pause” has been in the long-expected speed-up of global warming. The rate of surface warming should have accelerated in the past decade, rather than stay constant.

In fact, 2016 is shaping up badly as well (badly for us, that is):

No doubt 2015 will continue warming because of rising temperatures in the east-central tropical Pacific associated with the current El Niño (see here). So 2016 could well top 2015.

Your takeaway — the time to stop emitting CO2 is now. We could ramp down very aggressively if we wanted to, and still keep most of the trouble — the threat to the habitability of the planet — at bay. Or we can let the money people behind the carbon economy run the show for another ten years, pocketing the profit we're too afraid to deny them, and face the consequences.

It really is a choice, and it really is ours, not theirs, to make. Either way, news like this is not going to stop.

GP