"Gobsmackingly Bananas" Worldwide Extreme Hottest September Explained. And Yes, It's Alarming With A Tiny Asterisk

Boaters try to cool off on Lake Champlain at Burlington,
Vermont on a hot, humid September 4.  The month
was the world's hottest September on record by
a huge margin, which raised extra
concern among climate scientists.

 Most of the official numbers aren't quite in yet to tell us whether September, 2023 was the warmest, or ate least the warmest on record.  

But preliminary figures are shocking. 

As NBC News reports:

"Last month shattered the record for the hottest September on record by such a wide margin that climate scientists say it was almost beyond belief.

The September milestone, reported in ned dates released (Oct. 4) by the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service, added to an alarming stretch of record-breaking global temperatures. During June, July and August, the planet had its hottest summer on record 'by a large margin.'"

The Rotten Tomatoes style reviews of September by climate scientists and others involved in climate change issues are pretty impressive:

"Gobsmackingly bananas"

"Uncharted territories"

"The writing is clearly on the wall"

"It really makes me very nervous of what's to come."

"Flabbergasted."

"Overcome with grief"

"Bonkers"

"Mind-boggling"

You get the idea.

Some perspective: Yes, the preliminary September global temperature data is really shocking. And it's another sign that global climate change is really, really bad.  As if you didn't know that already. 

However, signs suggest that the September data is more of a sign of what's to come than what is current reality.  

I know the above sentence isn't exactly comfort to especially younger people who will live in a hotter, more dangerous world. 

As I've stated before in this here blog thingy, El Nino is giving an extra boost to climate change this year. El Nino always boosts global temperatures. Climate change helps oceans store additional heat, and El Nino encourages that ocean heat to release in the atmosphere in a pretty big burst. 

So it's not surprising that El Nino working in concert with climate change would have boosted September's numbers to unheard of levels.

However, even that one/two combo can't fully explain how out of whack September was. 

If preliminary figures pan out (We'll have final figures within a week or so), September beat the previous global heat record for the month by 0.5 degrees Celsius or about a degree Fahrenheit.

That doesn't sound like much, but in past experience, if a month becomes a new record warmest for Earth, it'll beat the previous mark by just a few hundredths of a degree. 

El Nino on average can add a couple tenths of a degree to the world's temperature, so I can guess that explains a little less than half of September's global heat. 

There's also probably some other factors at work.

As the Washington Post reports:

"Other factors may be contributing to the warming, (climate researcher Zeke) Hausfather,  said: Reduced emissions from shipping liners, allowing more sunlight to reach the oceans; the 2022 eruption of the South Pacific underwater volcano Hunga Tunga, which sent vast amounts of water vapor into the atmosphere; and an ongoing upswing in solar activity, slightly increasing the sun's warming effect on Earth."

But that still doesn't explain the entirety of September's global heat. 

All of this could also be partly a reflection of a poorly understood pendulum of climate trends. In the early 2000s, natural trends slowed, but did not stop the march of climate change.  Now, it seems that pendulum has swung to an acceleration of the Earth's warming. 

The major goal for climate activists and scientists has been to prevent the world's temperature from going more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

At this point, everybody knows there are and will be some periods in which the Earth is above that 1.5 degree threshold, but as long as the long term is below that level, we will be sorta, kinda OK. 

Roughly a third of the days so far this year have been 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Climate is variable month to month and year to year. There are signs that October is trending ever so closer to those pre-industrial temperature levels, and won't be quite as gonzo out of whack like September was, Hausfather, the climate researcher said on social media Monday.

Still, he thinks October could well be the world's warmest on record, following the trend of July, August and September. 

El Nino will probably last well into 2024, so we will probably see all time record warm years for the world in 2023 and 2024.

That El Nino will eventually end, and chances are we'll settle into a global pattern much like we saw after past El Ninos.  The warming trend either slows or sort of levels off for a few years after the El Nino, but it doesn't cool back down to the levels seen before that El Nino.  It's like a staircase, with each El Nino being a riser.

This is no Stairway to Heaven.  It's a stair case toward a more hellish, more dangerous, more challenging world unless fossil fuel emissions are cut down dramatically and fast.