World toasty in June
Feds: Record-warm June, and first six months of year.
Glenn Schwartz's essay on climate change prompted such a response that he felt compelled to follow with a post about the comments.
He expressed surprise that so many of the commenters misunderstood what he said or devoted more time commenting on other commenters than on the contents of his article. Welcome to the online world, Glenn.
Right now it looks like this topic is going to be a perennial.
In its latest report, the National Centers for Environmental Information (nee: National Climatic Data Center) crowned last month as the warmest June on record by a rather comfortable margin.
It also said that the first six months of 2015 constituted the warmest such period on record, by a narrower margin.
One factor in the warmth was the anomalous warming of sea-surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific – the El Nino phenomenon – which is forecast to persist the rest of the year, increasing the likelihood that this will be the warmest year on record.
In June, the globally averaged temperature was 1.58 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th Century average, beating June 2014, the former champ, by a full 0.22 degrees. The margin of error was 0.14 degrees. That represented the fourth monthly record set this year, the government said.
For the first six months of 2015, the average temperature of 1.53 bested 2010's by 0.16, which also was the margin of error.