February Was Earth's 7th Warmest; Continuing Trend In Supposedly "Cool" Regime

Another "red" world in February, 2022. Red areas
are where it was warmer than the long term average,
blue was cooler. The only big blue area is in the
eastern Pacific, which signifies a La Nina pattern.

 This is going to sound like a lot of posts you've read over the past few years, but you have to mark the occasion. 

The monthly global climate snapshot just came out, this one looking at February, 2022. Turns out it was the world''s 7th warmest February on record, according to NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. 

That's about where we've been the past several months. Seems each of the past few months have been around the fifth, sixth or seventh warmest on record. 

It's a bit alarming, of course, to have such consistently warm global temperatures. That's especially true during what has been a remarkably persistent La Nina global weather and oceanic pattern

La Nina, all other things being equal, tends to cool the world just a little bit. On one hand, that helps explain why we haven't had any "warmest ever" months lately for the globe as a whole. It's also disconcerting because we shouldn't be having top ten warmest months during a La Nina. 

For the record, this was the 46th consecutive February with temperatures at least marginally above the 20th century average, NCEI notes. That's a pretty long lasting trend, but global warming is persistent and getting worse, it seems.

The warmth in February was especially strong in Europe, with other areas of odd warmth in parts of South America and southern Africa.

The coolest areas, relative to average were interior North America and parts of Asia, but nobody had a record cold February. 

With just two months done for the year, NOAA is already giving 2022 a 99 percent chance of being one of the top 10 warmest years on record for the world. 

For the winter as a whole, the period between December 1 and February 28, the world tied with 2015 as having the fifth warmest winter on record, reports NCEI. Each of the last eight winters are among the top ten warmest on record. Reliable data goes back nearly 150 years.

There was a little more ice in the Arctic than in recent years in February, so I suppose that's good news. Still, it was the 14th lowest ice extent since reliable satellite records began 44 years ago, notes the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Antarctica had its lowest ice extent on record for most of the month.  This is a reversal from a few years ago, as Antarctica had some of the highest ice extents on record.