The shrill article below is panicking over February temperatures so I suppose I should point out a few obvious things. I have really dealt with this nonsense before but a few comments anyway.
For a start, hanging anything on the figures for one month is dumb. You can have unusually hot months in a year where there is no overall change. Even figures for one year are rubbery. Figures for years can go up and down but still show no overall trend. You need a trend over a period of years to conclude anything. 2015 was a touch warmer but 2016 could be a touch cooler overall. If we get an early return of La Nina, the later months of 2016 could be cool in the same way that the early months were warm. That’s all elementary stuff — even if it is conspicuously overlooked below.
It was a bit boring writing all that freshman-level stuff above but I was listening to some Stravinsky while I wrote it so that kept me alert and happy
But now to get onto the specifics about February 2016: According to NOAA (See here) The February 2016 temperature was 5.69°F above the C20 average. That seems a lot. One can understand it being called “whopping”. But wait a minute. 2005 was 4.12°F above the same average. Was that “whopping” too? Did that presage climate catastrophe? Ten years later we can say that it clearly didn’t. And February 2015 was -0.85°F — BELOW average. Did that warn of an oncoming ice age? Clearly not. Hanging your hat on one month is brick thick. I really shouldn’t have to point out what excreta the article below is. Temperatures fluctuate but there is no statistically significant long-term trend.
So Feb 2016 was a bit higher than 2005. Why? Easy: El Nino. Despite what is said below, it was in fact TOTALLY due to El Nino. How do I know that? Because it was NOT due to a rise in CO2. The recent temperature rises did not fit neatly into any one year. They were concentrated in late 2015 and early 2016, And that is PRECISELY a period over which CO2 levels plateaued. From August 2015 to February 2016, CO2 levels have been stuck on 398 ppm, according to the Cape Grim data. CO2 levels over that period only varied by less than one part per million. Annual changes before that were around 2 parts per million.
The big Warmist story is that warming is due to CO2 levels. If that were so, the recent rise in temperature would be a mirror of rising CO2 levels. But the CO2 levels belie that. They didn’t rise. Once again temperature and CO2 are disconnected. So El Nino is the only explanation left for the recent temperature uptick. It is an entirely natural fluctuation with nothing to do with human actions. That’s what the data tells us. Do look up the Cape Grim data yourself to check it
