And it looks like Nature had already opened her Pandora’s Box.

October 2015 temps of 1.28 C above 1880s levels…. That’s 64% of the allotted 2 C target. Worse when you compare it to the newly-agreed 1.5 C target from the COP21 conference.

[December 2014 through November 2015 temps of] 1.06 C Above 1880: Climate Year 2015 Shatters All Previous Records For Hottest Ever.

Robertscribbler 14 December 2015

We knew it was going to be a record breaker. We knew that atmospheric greenhouse gasses in the range of 400 parts per million CO2 and 485 parts per million CO2e, when combined with one of the top three strongest El Ninos in the Pacific, would result in new all-time global record high temperatures. But what we didn’t know was how substantial the jump would ultimately be.

 

Today, the numbers were made public by NASA. And I hate to say it, but it’s a real doozy. Overall, according to NASA, Climate Year 2015 — the 12 month period from December of 2014 through November of 2015 — was 0.84 C hotter than NASA’s 20th Century Baseline. That’s 0.11 C hotter than previous hottest year 2014 and a full 0.21 C hotter than climate change deniers’ favorite cherry — 1998. In other words past record hot years are being left in the dust as the world is heating up to ever more dangerously warm global temperatures.

(Image source: NASA GISS.)

In any case, the current NASA Graph above is going to need some serious adjusting as the new global average for climate year 2015 is simply off the top of the chart. A new jump that gives lie to the increasingly obvious fake claim made by climate change deniers over the past two years that global warming somehow ‘paused.’

 

But aside from reality once again making the fossil fuel cheerleaders of the world (aka climate change deniers) look increasingly imbecilic, 2015’s new temperature increase is a visible sign of increasing climate danger. This year’s 0.84 C temperature departure above NASA’s 20th Century baseline is 1.06 C hotter than 1880s values. It’s a number just 0.44 C (or two more strong El Ninos) away from crossing the very dangerous 1.5 C threshold that nations of the world recently pledged to attempt to avoid at the Paris Climate Summit. It’s also a number more than halfway toward hitting the catastrophic 2 C warming threshold. Perhaps more ominously, Monthly temperature departures in October of 2015 hit a range of 1.06 C above the 20th Century baseline and 1.28 C above 1880s averages — shorter term ranges that are already coming close to testing the 1.5 C threshold.

http://robertscribbler.com/2015/12/14/1-06-c-above-1880-climate-year-2015-shatters-all-previous-records-for-hottest-ever-recorded/?replytocom=60338#respond

And just how much of a percentage of 1.5 C of the COP21's agreed-to global warming target is 1.28 C above 1880s levels is? About 85%. Forget waiting for peak oil, peak natural gas and peak coal to occur if we want to avoid catastrophic climate change and even more bizarre global weirding -- business as usual warped by fossil fuel extraction peaks and declines will still yield an atmospheric CO2 content of about 550 ppm (CO2e would be worse), yielding an ECS temperature rise of 3 C and an ESS rise of 6 C over the space of a thousand years. In geological time, that means Near Term Human Extinction.