We Just Had the Hottest March In Recorded History

                                 

There is the scientific and ideological language for what is happening to the weather, but there are hardly any intimate words. Is that surprising? People in mourning tend to use euphemism; likewise the guilty and ashamed. The most melancholy of all the euphemisms: “The new normal.”“It’s the new normal,” I think, as a beloved pear tree, half-drowned, loses its grip on the earth and falls over. The train line to Cornwall washes away—the new normal. We can’t even say the word “abnormal” to each other out loud: it reminds us of what came before. Better to forget what once was normal, the way season followed season, with a temperate charm only the poets appreciated.

Zadie Smith, Elegy for a Country's Seasons

On Friday the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released their global temperature records for the month of March 2015, ranking it as the warmest March in their 136-year archive, or since 1880.  March now joins eight of the past twelve months which have set record temperatures for their respective months, globally.

The Japan Meteorological Agency also ranked March as the hottest in its records, while NASA put it in 3rd place, behind 2010 and 2002. Each agency handles temperature data in slightly different ways, which can lead to different rankings for months and years, though there is broad agreement between all three on the overall warming trend.

Despite the slight differences for March’s temperature, all three agencies ranked the year to date as the hottest in the books, with large areas of warmth over Russia and the Pacific Ocean. Those spots, particularly the Pacific, also helped boost 2014 to the top of the standings.

Think (or maybe try to feel ) what "March" is.  It's just a unit of measurement, tallying a thirty-one day time frame that represents the transition between what we know as "seasons." In this country, March traditionally marks the beginning of Spring, as temperatures gradually moderate, people begin to shed their winter coats or jackets, looking forward to the smell of grass and flowers and breathing in the fragrant, mild, warmer air. In the Northeast and Northwest, cookouts and grilling begin, people at work start to eat their lunches outside. Runners and hikers dress down for warm weather exercise. Birds wake us up in the morning, and the sun feels warm to our skin. It's the same every March, or it used to be.

But while Americans may not realize it or even think about it, this March was hotter than every March they've ever lived through, every March their parents and grandparents have lived through, and every March their parents and grandparents before them lived through.  It's a good deductive bet that March 2015 was hotter than any March during the rest of the 5500 years or so of civilized human history, but since humans didn't have a way of keeping track of global temperatures back then, I guess we'll never be able to "prove" that, which probably delights that species of people who call themselves "climate skeptics." Fourteen of the hottest fifteen years on record have occurred since 2000, again, based on data available since 1880.  

Ironically, 1880 also marked both the first American City lit up by electricity, as well as the first publication of the journal Science--backed financially by Thomas Edison.

Gavin Schmidt leads NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies:

Schmidt said in an email that the warmth displayed so far this year is “a reflection of two issues: the late 2014 start to the El Niño-like conditions, and the North Pacific warming on a baseline of slowly warming temperatures almost everywhere.”

That baseline of slow warming comes courtesy of a continued rise in greenhouse gas emissions that shows little sign of abating. The increase of the heat-trapping gases has elevated Earth’s temperature by 1.6°F since the beginning of the 20th century. Some scientists say that to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, that warming needs to stay under 2°C, or 3.6°F.

El Nino is a recurrent, natural phenomenon that has occurred for millennia. Consistent record-shattering temperatures cannot be attributed to it:

[A]ssociated with a band of warm ocean water that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific (between approximately the International Date Line and 120°W), including off the Pacific coast of South America. El Niño Southern Oscillation refers to the cycle of warm and cold temperatures, as measured by sea surface temperature, SST, of the tropical central and eastern Pacific Ocean. El Niño is accompanied by high air pressure in the western Pacific and low air pressure in the eastern Pacific.

The last strong El Nino occurred in 1997-1998. What is new, different and profoundly disturbing is El Nino accompanied in tandem by the highest recorded temperatures globally in human history.  Last year (2014) is currently the hottest year on record. It was not an El Nino year.

The quarterly months of January through March 2015 were also, incidentally, the warmest ever recorded since recording began. According to the NCDC State of the Climate Global Analysis:

The first quarter of 2015 was the warmest such period on record across the world's land and ocean surfaces, at 0.82°C (1.48°F) above the 20th century average, surpassing the previous record of 2002 by 0.05°C (0.09°F). The average global land surface temperature was also record high for the January–March period, at 1.59°C (2.86°F). Most of Europe, Asia, South America, eastern Africa, and western North America were much warmer than average, as shown by the Temperature Percentiles map above, with record warmth particularly notable in the western United States and eastern Siberia along the Verkhoyansk Range.

These are not the only records being set this year.  The percentage of Arctic Sea Ice has also extended to the least degree on record.

Arctic sea ice extent for March 2015 averaged 14.39 million square kilometers. This is the lowest March ice extent in the satellite record. It is 1.13 million square kilometers below the 1981 to 2010 long-term average of 15.52 million square kilometers. It is also 60,000 square kilometers below the previous record low for the month observed in 2006.

The diminishing ice is dramatically depicted in this video (which many here may have already seen):

           

In fact, about the only place not experiencing record heat was the Northeast Corridor of the U.S., encompassing Washington D.C. where the U.S. Senate, House of Representatives, and countless lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry live and work.

By all appearances, as far as they are concerned, the warming trend in March never happened.