NOAA: Hottest First Half of Year in Northern Hemisphere by Stunning 0.36°F - by Joe Romm

NOAA’s latest monthly climate report confirms that 2015 will crush previous global temperature records.

That’s especially true up here in the northern hemisphere, where the first half of 2015 is a remarkable 0.36°F warmer than the first half of any year since records started being kept 135 years ago.

Here are some of the other records for “combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces” in the dataset for the month of June from the years 1880 to 2015:

• Hottest first half of any year (January-June) at “1.53°F (0.85°C) above the 20th century average … surpassing the previous record of 2010 by 0.16°F (0.09°C).”
• Hottest June at “1.58°F (0.88°C) above the 20th century average … surpassing the previous record set last year in 2014 by 0.22°F (0.12°C).”

Left is the Northern Hemisphere plot of historical temperatures for January through June showing the huge jump this year.

So far, this year is blowing past every other year in terms of average global temperatures. And as NOAA notes, “2010 was the last year with El Niño conditions; however El Niño had ended by this point in 2010, while it appears to be continuing to mature at the same point in 2015.” El Niños generally lead to global temperature records, as the short-term El Niño warming adds to the underlying long-term global warming trend.

NOAA reports that the current “strengthening El Niño” has a better than 90 percent chance of lasting through the winter and “around an 80 percent chance it will last into early spring 2016.” So 2015 is almost certain to smash the global temperature record set in 2014 — and it is entirely possible if not likely that 2016 will break whatever records 2015 sets. It bears repeating we now appear to be in the early stages of the long-awaited jump in global warming.

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