Now It's Confirmed: World Was Insanely Hot In September

We got confirmation Friday that the world had by far
it's hottest September on record. Just a patch
near the tip of South America and a pinpoint
northeast of Greenland were on the cool side.

 As promised in an earlier post, when I said there would be updates,  NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information gave us big time confirmation that September's global heat was just insane. 

NCEI said September was the world's hottest September by a wide margin. Here's some perspective they provided: 

"'September, 2023 was the fourth month in a row of record-warm global temperatures,' said NOAA Chief Scientist Dr. Sarah Kapnick. 'Not only was it the warmest September on record, it was far and away the most atypically warm months of any (emphasis theirs, not mine) in NOAA's 174 years of climate keeping. To put it another way, September, 2023 was warmer than the average July from 2001-2010."

July is normally the world's hottest month of the year, despite the fact it is mid-winter in the Southern Hemisphere. The Julys in 2001-2010 were also warmer than the long term average, thanks to global climate change. So September's figures are really a big, big deal. 

September globally was 2.59 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th century average for the month. That might not sound like much.  But the world is so vast with such variable weather that month to month and year to year changes are very small.

In recent years, if a month breaks a record for hottest on record, it does so by exceeding the previous mark buy less than a degree Fahrenheit.  This is why I said in that earlier post that scientists are gobsmacked by September's figures. 

It definitely was the highest monthly temperature anomaly - "which indicates how much warmer or cooler temperatures are from the long-term average - of any month on record," said NCEI.

Given that September was so warm globally, it was hard to find any areas that were cooler than average, or at least near normal. The only cooler than average spots I could find was a patch in the Pacific Ocean around the southern tip of South America. And a tiny patch of Arctic Ocean northeast of Greenland. That's about it. 

Africa, Europe, North and South America and Antarctica had their hottest September on record.  The cold spots maybe were Asia and the Arctic, which only had their second warmest September. 

Ocean surface temperatures also set a record high for September, which was the sixth month in a row a record was set. 

I've been tracking these monthly global climate statistics for years, decades, really, and I've never seen anything remotely like this. 

As I like to do every month, I like to remind you the last time the world had a slightly cooler than average month. If you are younger than 44.5 years old, you've never seen a cooler than average global month. If you are younger than 49, you've never seen a globally cooler than average September. 

The fact that September was so bonkers warm means that 2023 is definitely in line to become the world's hottest year on record. July and August were also the hottest months on record. The extreme September seems to have sealed the deal. NCEI is now saying that there's more than a 99 percent cache that this year will be the world's hottest year.

As mentioned in my earlier post, El Nino is working in concert with climate change to really boost global temperatures this  year.  El Nino should end temporarily within the next one or two years, and that will sort of turn some of the heat down.

But only a tiny bit. As Yale Climate Connections reported in an  update, when El Nino ends, global temperatures should temporarily fall by only 0.2 to 0.3 degrees Celsius. That will bring us down to levels that are still warmer than anything before 2015 or so.