2016 blowing away global heat records so far

The global warm weather hits just keep on coming.

Two years ago 2014 claimed the spot as the hottest year on record globally. Then, 2015 blew away that record by margins that stunned many climate observers. Now, 2016 is producing off the charts warm global temperature numbers so far.

More than halfway to +2 degrees Celsius

The magnitude of warming in the global temperature record so far in 2016 is astounding. Global mean temperatures are running an eye opening +1.15 Celsius vs. the 20th century average so far in 2016. That's already past the halfway point of the IPCC temperature target of limiting warming to +2 degrees Celsius by 2100.

NOAA reports March 2016 was the hottest March on record globally. The March heat record extends an amazing string of record warm months to 11 in a row according to NOAA.

More perspective here on the amazing run of global warmth from Andrea Thompson at Climate Central.

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The past 11 months have been the hottest such months in 135 years of recordkeeping, a streak that has itself set a record and puts in clear terms just how much the planet has warmed due to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

New global temperature data released on Friday by NASA put March at 2.3°F (1.28°C) above the 1951-1980 average for the month, making it the warmest March on record. It beat out the previous warmest March, from 2010, by 0.65°F (0.36°C) — a handy margin.

It also marked the sixth month in a row to set such a record in NASA data and is expected to be the 11th month in a row in data kept by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, beating out the previous such streak of 10 months set back in 1944.

March also marked six straight months with temperatures that were more than 1°C above average, a notable mark given the stated goal of international climate talks to keep warming in the 21st century below 2°C (with some talk of even aiming for 1.5°C).

The red lines keep winning. Here's another perspective from Weather Underground.

Is recent global warm spike the start of something much bigger?

The off the charts temperature trends of recent years are making some wonder if we've entered a new, more aggressive global temperature rise phase. This piece in March from Chris Mooney at The Washington Post on how current atmospheric changes compare to the rapidly warming Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) era is fairly alarming.

If you dig deep enough into the Earth’s climate change archives, you hear about the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM. And then you get scared.

This is a time period, about 56 million years ago, when something mysterious happened — there are many ideas as to what — that suddenly caused concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to spike, far higher than they are right now. The planet proceeded to warm rapidly, at least in geologic terms, and major die-offs of some marine organisms followed due to strong acidification of the oceans.

The cause of the PETM has been widely debated. Some think it was an explosion of carbon from thawing Arctic permafrost. Some think there was a huge release of subsea methane that somehow made its way to the atmosphere — and that the series of events might have been kickstarted by major volcanic eruptions.

[We had all better hope these scientists are wrong about the planet’s future]

In any case, the result was a hothouse world from pole to pole, some 5 degrees Celsius warmer overall. But now, new research suggests, even the drama of the PETM falls short of our current period, in at least one key respect: We’re putting carbon into the atmosphere at an even faster rate than happened back then.

Such is the result of a new study in Nature Geoscience, led by Richard Zeebe of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and colleagues from the University of Bristol in the UK and the University of California-Riverside.

“If you look over the entire Cenozoic, the last 66 million years, the only event that we know of at the moment, that has a massive carbon release, and happens over a relatively short period of time, is the PETM,” says Zeebe. “We actually have to go back to relatively old periods, because in the more recent past, we don’t see anything comparable to what humans are currently doing.”

Global temperature trends in the next decade could tell us a lot about just how quickly planetary warming is accelerating for the rest of this century.