Drizzling rain and chilly this Monday morning on California’s north coast as we near the end of our latest block of ‘conveyor-belt’ rainstorms — supposedly, clear skies with lots of sunshine starting tomorrow and lasting a few days.
According to the NWS, a high pressure moving slowly, and sulking about the shoreline will keep the weather dry, maybe til Saturday.
In an official release on Saturday, NASA confirmed February was the hottest month ever, which created a chatter of concern from scientists and climate agencies.
The new data had been tossed about earlier — I posted about it here, about a week or so ago. Thrust of the figures concluded earth had peaked at two-degrees Celsius above “normal,” a horrible predicament and much, much earlier than previously thought.
A number of studies recently have not been nice in relation to our environment about to go real-whacky.
On the NASA info, more from the Guardian this morning:
The Nasa data shows the average global surface temperature in February was 1.35C warmer than the average temperature for the month between 1951-1980, a far bigger margin than ever seen before.
The previous record, set just one month earlier in January, was 1.15C above the long-term average for that month.
And the cries of warning:
“We are in a kind of climate emergency now,” said Prof Stefan Rahmstorf, from the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research in Germany. He told Fairfax Media: “This is really quite stunning … it’s completely unprecedented.”
“This is a very worrying result,” said Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, noting that each of the last five months globally have been hotter than any month preceding them.
“These results suggest that we may be even closer than we realised to breaching the [2C] limit. We have used up all of our room for manoeuvre. If we delay any longer strong cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, it looks like global mean surface temperature is likely to exceed the level beyond which the impacts of climate change are likely to be very dangerous.”
…
Prof Adam Scaife, at the UK Met Office, said the very low levels of Arctic ice were also helping to raise temperatures: “There has been record low ice in the Arctic for two months running and that releases a lot of heat.”
He said the Met Office had forecast a record-breaking 2016 in December: “It is not as if you can’t see these things coming.”
Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, UK, said: “It is a pretty big jump between January and February, although this data from Nasa is only the first set of global temperature data.
“We will need to see what the figures from NOAA and the Met Office say. It is in line with our expectations that due to the continuing effect of greenhouse gas emissions, combined with the effects of El Niño on top, 2016 is likely to beat 2015 as the warmest year on record.”
Calling the NASA numbers ‘a bombshell of a climate report,’ meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters and science writer Bob Henson at WunderBlog on Sunday nailed the bottom line: ‘The real significance of the February record is in its departure from the seasonal norms that people, plants, animals, and the Earth system are accustomed to dealing with at a given time of year.’
Springtime early…
(Illustration above found here).