RealClimate: Back to basics

You can tell how worried the climate deniers are by how many fields of science they have to trash to try and have people not see what’s happening.

it will not have escaped most people’s notice that global temperatures are heading into uncharted territory. The proximate cause of this week’s headlines is the Climate Reanalyzer website at the U. Maine which provides a nice front end to the NOAA NCEP CFS forecast system and reanalysis and shows absolute daily temperatures in early July clearly exceeding the highest pre-existing temperatures from August 2016. It’s an arresting graphic, and follows in from the record high ocean surface temperatures that were being reported a month ago.

This is however a relatively new resource and was not online the last time that we set absolute temperature records (in summer 2016). So this has both salience and novelty – a potent combination!

The ultimate cause of these patterns is of course the ongoing global warming, driven almost entirely by human activities.

What are we looking at?

As we’ve explained before, all…