NOAA said last month marks the 15th month in a row in which global heat records have been broken. That continues the longest streak of record-breaking temperatures since reporting began.
NASA, which analyzes weather data from from 6,300 locations around the world, considers July 2016 to be the 10th consecutive record-setting month.
By either tally, the trend is disturbing and has no end in sight.
Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in a statement that it “appears almost a certainty [ http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/news/20160816/ ]” that 2016 will go down as the warmest year on record.
Given that and the fact that July is usually the hottest month of the year, this record isn’t too surprising, Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said in an email to HuffPost.
El Niño, a phenomenon highlighted by warmer-than-usual sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific, is capable of changing weather around the globe [ http://www.vox.com/2015/8/17/9164499/el-nino-2015 ]. Last year’s was “one of the strongest El Niño events [ https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/bams ] the globe has experienced since at least 1950,” according to a NOAA-led report.
“[T]his jump, and this record are both scary reminders how climate change can speed up and really catch society off guard,” Jonathan T. Overpeck, the co-director of the Institute of the Environment at the University of Arizona, told HuffPost. “Unusually bad flooding, likely made worse by a warmer atmosphere is in the news, but don’t forget that droughts are also being made worse by the warming, as is the risk of the biggest severe wildfires.”
A flood affected woman stands on a highland at Guthail, Jamalpur earlier this month. According to the Bangladesh Disaster Management Bureau around 1.5 million people have been affected by this year’s flood. Probal Rashid via Getty Images
In response to Roberts’ claim, NASA spokeswoman Karen Northon told The Huffington Post that the science is “crystal clear.”
“NASA’s global temperature analysis uses three independent data sources provided by other agencies. Quality control checks are regularly performed on that data,” Northon wrote in an email. “NASA is confident in the quality of this data and stands by previous scientifically-based conclusions regarding global temperatures.”
Penn State’s Mann said Roberts’ comments show “we’ve truly reached the bottom of the barrel of climate change denial when we have elected representatives attacking NASA, the scientific institution that put us on the moon and engineered the modern space program.”
“We’ve reached a whole new level of conspiratorial thinking,” Mann added, “a brave new world of epistemic closure where the more authoritative the confirmation of our scientific understanding, the deeper and wider the conspiracy simply must extend.”
But confronting the industries responsible for the rise of CO2 remains tied up in U.S. politics.
“This is not a drill,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) wrote to HuffPost. “This latest record is a measurement ? not a theory ? and it shows the real-time effects of our carbon pollution on the climate. One wonders how many headlines like this it will take for Republicans to decide addressing climate change is more important than abetting the fossil fuel industry.”
Bill McKibben, an environmentalist and co-founder of 350.org [ http://350.org/ ], told HuffPost the changes we’re living through right now are ones geologists will someday look back on in awe.
“Awe that we were here to see it happening and didn’t lift a finger to stop it,” McKibben said.
This post has been updated with more reactions to the record-breaking temperatures. Lydia O’Connor contributed reporting.
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