It’s cold where I am.
But the earth as a whole continues to be gobsmackingly warm.
The world warmed to yet another monthly heat record in January, despite an abnormally chilly United States, a cooling La Nina and predictions of a slightly less hot 2025, according to the European climate service Copernicus.
The surprising January heat record coincides with a new study by a climate science heavyweight, former top NASA scientist James Hansen, and others arguing that global warming is accelerating. It’s a claim that’s dividing the research community.
January 2025 globally was 0.09 degrees Celsius (0.16 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than January 2024, the previous hottest January, and was 1.75 C (3.15 F) warmer than it was before industrial times, Copernicus calculated. It was the 18th month of the last 19 that the world hit or passed the internationally agreed upon warming limit of 1.5 C (2.7 F) above pre-industrial times. Scientists won’t regard the limit as breached unless and until global temperatures stay above it for 20 years.
Copernicus records date to 1940, but other U.S. and British records go back to 1850, and scientists using proxies such as tree rings say this era is the warmest in about 120,000 years or since the start of human civilization.
By far the biggest driver of record heat is greenhouse gas buildup from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, but the natural contributions to temperature change have not been acting quite as expected, said Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate for the European weather agency.
The big natural factor in global temperatures is usually the natural cycle of changes in the equatorial Pacific Ocean waters. When the central Pacific is especially warm, it’s an El Nino and global temperatures tend to spike. Last year was a substantial El Nino, though it ended last June and the year was even warmer than initially expected, the hottest on record.
I am sure you know that early models tend to be simplified and linear in the attempt to illustrate a new main effect. So, interactions are typically left out of early models even is there is good reason to expect they play a role. In addition, there is the perception bias that interactions are of smaller magnitude than main effects. In genetics, this has been a pattern for decades, and only recently have gene interactions been included in some models. Lastly, in statistics, testing for interactions is less powerful because they way interactions are defined necessarily reduces the degrees of freedom in the test— lead into s statistical bias: main effects are easier to detect and quantify with more precision than are interaction effects. It is only when Nature starts signaling that she is not conforming to the best linear models, that interactions begin to get the consideration they deserve as an explanation. Most people know that interactions are the essence: peanut butter and jelly; Lennon and McCartney; eggs and bacon; coffee and a cigarette… but interactions ( except in physics where it is all interaction) are the last thing to add to models and measure in ecology and other biological sciences.
“January 2025 globally was 0.09 degrees Celsius (0.16 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than January 2024”
Huh?
CO2 was also (not surprising) higher in January 2025 than January 2024 (and at an annual increase of nearly 4 ppm also seems (unsurprisingly) to be accelerating), despite AI and all the latest model enhancements, there seems to be a general reluctance to predict the relationship atmospheric co2 density/global temperature, since the informative and interesting 2005 “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change: A Scientific Symposium on Stabilisation of Greenhouse Gases”, where it was narrowed down, using the best science of the time.
Over time the issue seems to have got more and more diffused and more and more political, lets get back to basics and try and recreate the successful Montreal Protocol, like we did in the late 1980’s. We managed that without AI and today’s supercomputers. Keep it scientific and ban religion and politics, and ultra national greed.
NOAA – Monthly Average Mauna Loa CO2
January 2025: 426.65 ppm (annual increase 3.85 ppm)
January 2024: 422.80 ppm
Last updated: Feb 07, 2025
I found this article in “Inside Climate News” helpful, on the surprise of record global temperatures during a non El Nino period. Both Hansen and Trenberth are quoted. After a period of being called Alarmist, Woke and other stupid names, can’t we just admit CO2 is beginning to get dangerously high and all will not stay gentle and linear. Not tIme for isolationism folks.
“In the Northern Hemisphere, the new study may have identified the reduction of aerosols and associated cloud changes as an important driver of the recent warming spike, but the Southern Hemisphere has also warmed, and aerosols are not likely the cause, said Kevin Trenberth, distinguished scholar with the National Center for Atmospheric Research and an honorary academic with the department of physics at University of Auckland in New Zealand.”
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04022025/james-hansen-research-documents-global-warming-acceleration/