Portending a Very Hot 2016, January Eviscerates Global Temperature Record

Last month was the hottest January the planet has experienced since record-keeping began nearly 140 years ago,  new data released by NASA on Tuesday confirmed—and not by just a little.

January’s global average surface temperature during was 1.13º Celsius (or 2.3º Fahrenheit) above historical averages, according to the data.

Making the single-month record even more troubling, as Andrew Freedman notes at Mashable, is that January also capped a three-month period of record-shattering warming, making it much harder to claim that the spike in January represents a fluke.

Climate Central took a close look at the new figures:

As Phil Plait explains at Slate, the latest temperature data comes from “land and ocean measurements analyzed by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, using NOAA temperature measuring stations across the world. These are extremely high quality and reliable datasets of global temperature measurements — despite the fallacious cries of a few.”

According to Sally Elliot writing for The Inquisitr:

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