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After 16 consecutive months of record-breaking global average temperatures, the month of September, 2016, came in merely as the second-highest in the 137-year record, 0.04°C (0.07°F) cooler than the current record holder, September 2015.

While we might congratulate last September for not being quite as ambitious as the sixteen months that preceded it, second place still means that the month came in at 0.86°C (1.55°F) above the 20th century average of 15.0°C (59.0°F). This is slightly down from August’s monthly record, of which marked a departure of 0.92°C (1.66°F) above the 20th century average of 15.6°C (60.1°F). read more

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The levels of carbon dioxide found in the atmosphere in modern times have been found to be nearly ten times higher than any other time since the extinction of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago. The event that came the closest to today’s CO2 levels, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), occurred 55.5 million years ago, where a spike in greenhouse gasses caused global temperatures to increase by 5–8 °C over what we’re experiencing today. While the existence and cause of the PETM is well established, the source of the massive amount of CO2 that caused the temperature spike has been a complete mystery to scientists.read more

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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has appointed long-time climate change denier Myron Ebell as his new head of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition, provided Trump is elected this fall. Ebell is well known as a global warming denier, with the Financial Times calling him “one of America’s most prominent climate change skeptics”, and would be expected to carry many of out Trump’s plans to undo years of ecological protection policy, including the elimination of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan.
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A new study that employs global positioning system measurements has revealed that the Greenland ice sheet is melting much faster than what previous estimates indicated, by roughly 7.6 percent. Previous estimates pegged the amount of ice loss between 2003 and 2013 at 2,500 billion tons, but the new study corrects this to 2,700 billion tons — a major factor in estimating the rate of future sea level rise.
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