September brought the world’s record-breaking hot streak to an end – but don’t chill out

Global temperature anomalies for 1950-2016
(from a 1901-2005) with red bars marking 
El Niño years and blue bars marking La Niña years.
The 2016 estimate is the difference between
the years of the last strong El Niño (1997 and 1998)
added to the 2015 anomaly.
The warmth of the last three years follows the early-2000s.

According to data released by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) this week, September 2016 was the second-hottest September on record globally. Until then, every month since April 2015 was the hottest for its month on record (the hottest August, the hottest July, and so on).

Back in April 2015, Donald Trump was still considering whether to run for US president while Malcolm Turnbull was still five months away from becoming Australian Prime Minister. Since then we’ve also seen two new versions of the iPhone come out.

So our 16-month streak of record heat is a long one. In fact it’s the longest in NOAA’s 137-year records of global temperatures. Other global temperature series have slightly different records but the general story is the same – the last couple of years have been very hot.

Read the piece on The Conversation by a Climate Extremes Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Andrew King, and a Research Fellow in Climate and Water Resources, also from the University of Melbourne, Benjamin J. Henley -  “September brought the world’s record-breaking hot streak to an end – but don’t chill out.”