NASA: Earth Tops Hottest 12 Months On Record Again, Thanks To Warm February

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/03/15/3630404/nasa-hottest-12-months-record/

by Joe Romm Posted on March 15, 2015

There had never been as hot a 12-month period in NASA’s database as February 2014–January 2015. But that turned out to be a very short-lived record.

NASA reported this weekend that last month was the second-hottest February on record, which now makes March 2014–February 2015 the hottest 12 months on record. This is using a 12-month moving average, so we can “see the march of temperature change over time,” rather than just once every calendar year.

We are experiencing the continuation of the global warming trend that made 2014 the hottest calendar year on record. The very latest science says we should expect an acceleration in surface temperature warming to start quite soon. What is happening now is consistent with that.

Once again February has been cold for those of us living in the eastern and northeastern U.S. — and once again, the rest of the country and the globe is quite warm, with large parts of Asia and Alaska experiencing nearly off-the-charts heat. That’s clear in the NASA chart below for February temperatures, whose upper range extends to a whopping 8.4°C (15.1°F) above the 1951-1980 average!

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Also, as climatologist Peter Gleick noted on twitter, “California’s February temperatures blast[ed] through 120-year record. 8 degrees F above 20th [Century] avg.” As this NOAA data shows, last month the Golden State averaged a full 1°F higher than the second-warmest February on record:

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As we reported earlier this month, NOAA finally announced the arrival of a “weak” and “elusive” El Niño. It is usually the combination of the underlying long-term warming trend and the regional El Niño warming pattern that leads to new global temperature records. Here, the El Niño is quite weak but the global warming trend is very strong.

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