Significantly, January had the single biggest recorded monthly temperature anomaly (deviation from the 1951-1980 average temperature) — a whopping 2°F above the average January temperature. This means it’s even more likely that 2016 will not just be one of the hottest years on record, but very possibly
even hotter than 2015, which itself was the hottest year on record since … 2014.
If you detect a pattern here of human-caused global warming, you are in the company of more than
97 percent of climate scientists. True, every year is not going to be warmer than the last — but we do appear to be in the long-awaited
global warming speed up. And a
recent analysis of 2015’s record warming by Climate Central makes clear that virtually all of the warming — some 95 percent — is due to human activity.