Arkady
President
Last year was a blisteringly hot one, globally -- the warmest in the instrument record (going back 137 years), and likely the warmest in 120,000 years, based on paleoclimate reconstructions. 2017 was expected to be much cooler, since global temperatures tend to be highest in El Niño years and lower in the subsequent La Niña cycle. We saw something similar in 1999, when the '98 El Niño ended and the global temperature anomaly dropped by a third, such that '98 was the eighth hottest year and '99 was the twentieth.
What's extraordinary, though, is how little relief we're getting from the global heat wave, this time around. March had the biggest temperature anomaly of any non- El Niño month on record. In fact, the first quarter of this year was warmer than the first quarter of 2015 (currently the second-warmest year on record), despite there having been El Niño conditions at the time. The only thing keeping us from setting records right now is just how intense the heat was last year, at the height of the El Niño event.
This suggests that we have almost arrived at a place where the underlying trend of anthropogenic warming is so strong that it overwhelms the impact of other cycles even over short timelines. In other words, we are getting closer to a future where every year is hotter than the last.
What's extraordinary, though, is how little relief we're getting from the global heat wave, this time around. March had the biggest temperature anomaly of any non- El Niño month on record. In fact, the first quarter of this year was warmer than the first quarter of 2015 (currently the second-warmest year on record), despite there having been El Niño conditions at the time. The only thing keeping us from setting records right now is just how intense the heat was last year, at the height of the El Niño event.
This suggests that we have almost arrived at a place where the underlying trend of anthropogenic warming is so strong that it overwhelms the impact of other cycles even over short timelines. In other words, we are getting closer to a future where every year is hotter than the last.