Again, we encounter the text: “the warmest [month] on record.” Whatever else is going on the world — pandemics, bigotry, authoritarianism, protests, elections with very poor choices, insurrections by supporters of the twice-impeached former president... Behind all of that, the globe continues to warm as scientists have warned for decades. “Each of the last four decades has been the warmest on record since preindustrial times.” (Source: United Nations Climate Report, 2021)

We can expect rising sea levels, shrinking glaciers, disappearing ice caps, thawing tundra (which releases more greenhouse gases), accelerated desertification, famine, and more. Even if people eventually realize — as most scientists already know — that much of the reason for the warming is humanity’s release of greenhouse gases, it might be too late to avoid most of the damage. In November 2019, more than 11,000 scientists endorsed a statement in BioScience which used the word “emergency” to describe the current climate crisis. “The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected”, the statement said. “It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity.”

In addition to average temperatures, major recent studies have discovered a surge in occurrences of combined heat/humidity that “surpass the physiological limits of human survival”. Like most of the worst effects of the climate catastrophe, these also disproportionately harm the poorest humans.

This is an update on the ongoing string of “warmest month” reports in recent years. The older snippets summarize older, longer blog entries of mine, which I decided to compile into this omnibus entry — for ease of linking to a single page (rather than maintaining a long list of separate entries.) The newer ones, I’ve added as time passed.

2021

July 2021 was the hottest month in recorded human history (in addition to, obviously, being the warmest July on record). It surpassed July 2016, which (according to NOAA figures) was tied by 2019 and 2020. Also in July, the peak of Greenland’s ice sheet saw rain for the first time in known history. This followed two melt events on the ice sheet, something that almost never happens, much less twice in a month.

2020

2020 was the warmest year on record, narrowly surpassing 2016, according to NASA. (Other agencies around the globe place 2020 either in a tie with 2016 or just behind it in second place.)

May 2020 was the warmest May on record, with the most above-average temperatures recorded in Siberia, Alaska, and Antarctica.

April 2020 tied with April 2016 as the warmest April on record, cementing scientists’s predictions that 2020 will finish in the top two warmest years on record.

January 2020 was the warmest January on record, surpassing (according to the NOAA) the previous record set in 2016. It was the 44th consecutive January and the 421st consecutive month with temperatures above the 20th-century average. Locally, here in Killeen, January 2020 tied for second-warmest of all time.

2019

2019 was the second-warmest year on record, and the final year of the warmest DECADE in recorded history.

November 2019 was the second-warmest November on record, globally, behind only November 2015.

October 2019 was the warmest October on record, narrowly edging out October 2015. (Locally, Killeen saw the coolest October in at least ten years.)

September 2019 was the warmest September on record, about 1.02 degrees above the 1981-2010 average for the month, beating out September 2016 for the title. Locally, Killeen also saw its warmest September on record, beating the previous record (2015) by 2.45°F.

July 2019 was the warmest July on record, narrowly edging out the blockbuster July of 2016, which, at the time, was the warmest month ever recorded in the history of record-keeping. Heat records were set across Europe, including an astounding 108.7°F in Paris, and nearly 200 billion tons of Greenland ice melted into the North Atlantic.

June 2019 was the warmest June on record, according to both NASA and European climate data. Not only was June 2019 the warmest June in more than a century of record-keeping, but the whole first half of the year was the second-warmest first half of a year (behind 2016’s first half). Carbon dioxide concentrations in our atmosphere are at an 800,000-year high and accelerating at unprecedented rates.

2016

The year 2016 was the warmest year on record, globally, according to NASA and NOAA.

NASA’s global temperature average dataset shows that August 2016 tied July 2016 as the warmest month ever recorded (and, perhaps obviously, set the August record). This is significant because July is typically the warmest month of the year (global average). Notably, until October 2015, no month had ever varied more than 1°C from the 1951-1980 average, but every month afterward shattered that threshold.

July 2016 was the warmest month ever recorded. Not just the warmest July on record, but the warmest month, period. (Note: it was later surpassed by July 2019.) In the chart above/right, the red line above all the others represents the monthly global temperature averages for 2016. The entire line is above all the other lines. Here in Killeen, Texas, July 2016 was the second-warmest July ever recorded (note: it was later surpassed as second-warmest by July 2018), with July 2011 still the warmest on record.

I’m sounding like a broken record, but only because we keep breaking records. June 2016 was the warmest June on record (until beaten by June 2019; see above). It broke the record set by June 2015, the 14th consecutive month to have broken a monthly record — and that streak of 14 is itself a record. The January-through-June period in 2016 was the warmest January-through-June period in recorded history.

May 2016 was the warmest May on record. The World Meteorological Organization warned of a “fundamental change” in the global climate — the bulk of scientists studying global climate trends are now convinced that none of us will in our lifetimes see a return to the climate that our grandparents experienced — even if we stop burning fossil fuels today.

April 2016 was the warmest April on record. (Click here to see a chart of global temperature rise since the 1880s.)

Beating March 2010 for the title, March 2016 was the warmest March on record, 1.28°C above the baseline 1951-1980 average.

Not only was February 2016 the warmest February on record, it was the “most abnormally warm month ever recorded”, globally. Here in Killeen, February 2016 was also the warmest February ever recorded (note: it was beaten significantly in 2017).

January 2016, globally, was the warmest January on record, and one of the “most unusually warm” months.

2015

The year 2015 was the warmest year on record, beating out 2014 for that title. Click here to see a chart of yearly temperatures since 1880. And 2015 did it by the “widest margin ever”.

November 2015 was the warmest November ever recorded, “by a huge margin”. Meanwhile, humans continue to pump 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year — which means the Earth will continue to warm, even after (if) we ever get our greenhouse gas emissions under control.

According to the NOAA, October 2015 was not only the warmest October on record for the Earth, but the “greatest above-average departure from average for any month”. Here in Killeen, October 2015 tied with October 2014 for the warmest October on record in Central Texas (note: both were beaten by October 2016).

While conservatives continue to spout the “global warming is a hoax” trope, September 2015 clocked in as the warmest September in the 136-year history of global temperature averages. I still see “the Earth hasn’t warmed since 1998” or “the planet is actually cooling” on social media, ignoring actual facts. Here in Killeen, September 2015 was the warmest September on local record, beating September 2011 for the top spot.

August 2015 was the warmest August on record, beating August 2014.

According to NASA climate data (here), July 2015 was the warmest July ever recorded (note: it was later defeated by July 2016). In case some of the conservative base begins to believe the climate data, elected GOP representatives are trying to cut NASA’s budget in order to keep the data from even being recorded or analyzed — they’ve switched from “we don’t know” to “we don’t WANT to know”, which is even worse.

June 2015 was the warmest June on record; the previous record is from June 2014.

NOAA weather data shows that “combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for May 2015 was the highest for May in the 136-year period of record”.

March 2015 was the warmest March on record (see also NOAA data). Further, the first three months of 2015 were the warmest first three months of any year on record.

February was the second-warmest February on record.

Despite professional liar Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) recently bringing a snowball to the Senate floor to prove he is a buffoon, January 2015 was the second-warmest January on record. No one 38 years or younger has ever lived through a year in which the global temperature average was below average (source).

2014

2014 was the warmest year since record-keeping began. (Note: it was beaten by 2015.)

October 2014 was the warmest October on record, beating out October 2003.

September 2014 was the warmest year on record. (Note: it was later surpassed by 2015.)

August 2014 beat the previous record-warmest August (from 1998). Nine of the 10 warmest Augusts on record have occurred during the 21st century.

Both May and June of 2014 were the warmest of all time for those months. Both months beat records set in 2010.