WASHINGTON (AP) -
Earth’s record-breaking heat is sounding an awful lot like a broken record.
The National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday that August, this
past summer and the first eight months of 2015 all smashed global records
for heat.
That’s the fifth
straight record hot season in a row and the fourth consecutive record hot
month. Meteorologists say 2015 is a near certainty to eclipse 2014 as the
hottest year on record. This year, six of the eight months have been record
breaking, with only April and January failing to set new records.
Since 2000, Earth
has broken monthly heat records 30 times and seasonal heat records 11 times.
The last time a monthly cold record was broken was in 1916. Records go back
to 1880.
“For scientists,
these are just a few more data points in an increasingly long list of broken
records (that) is due to warming temperatures,” Texas Tech climate scientist
Katharine Hayhoe said in an email. “As individuals, though, this is yet
another reminder of the impact our unprecedented and inadvertent experiment
- an experiment that began with the Industrial Revolution - is having on our
planet today.”
Scientists blame a
combination of human-caused climate change and natural El Nino, a warming of
the equatorial Pacific Ocean that changes weather worldwide.
Global warming is
like the steady climbing of stairs and then El Nino “is like standing on
your tippy toes” while climbing those stairs, said Deke Arndt, global
monitoring chief for NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.
August’s global
temperature average was 61.7 degrees, breaking the previous record, set last
year, by a sixth of a degree. The summer average temperature broke the
previous record from last year by a fifth of a degree. Those are “relatively
large jumps over the last record” in the world of climate monitoring, Arndt
said.
NOAA calculates
that there is a 97 percent chance that 2015 will break 2014’s hottest year
mark, but that was before August was factored in. August makes that even
more likely, Arndt said.
With the El Nino,
NOAA forecasts an unusually warm fall for the eastern, western and northern
parts of the nation, as well as Alaska, with New Mexico and half of Texas
forecast to be cooler than normal. The southern two-thirds of the nation,
and parts of Alaska, should be wetter than normal this fall, with New
England and the Pacific Northwest forecast to be on the dry side, NOAA
forecast.
NOAA’s preliminary
winter forecast predicts warmer than normal temperatures for north of the
Mason-Dixon line, the West Coast and Alaska. It calls for cooler than normal
temperatures from New Mexico to South Carolina. Wetter weather is forecast
for the winter for nearly all the U.S. coastal regions.