The National Centers for Environmental Information tell us that October was nearly 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the previous warmest in 2015. Half a degree doesn't sound like much, but that's a hugely wide margin when you take in the entire world's data.
Wildly remarkably, October was the fifth consecutive month to break the record for the world's hottest.
If you are under 47 years old, you've never seen a global October that was cooler than the 20th century average. The long trend of climate change continues, and has accelerated, at least temporarily.
The warmest areas relative to average were the Arctic north of Canada and Alaska; most of Siberia and Mongolia, southern Europe, central South America, southeastern Canada and New England.
One relatively cool spot on Earth in October was much of Antarctica (which is a good thing, considering how worried we are about massive ice melt down there).
The only other sort of coolish areas were a part of northern Scandinavia, a small patch of the Indian Ocean southwest of Indonesia, a tiny spot in central Australia and southeastern Montana. That's about it. And those areas were only slightly cooler than the long temp average.
I've already seen climatologists start to analyze November so far. While global temperatures aren't trending quite as far above normal as they did in October, November still seems to be in line to become the warmest on record.
This year is so far the warmest on record, according to NCEI. We now have a greater than 99 percent chance of this year being the hottest on record. That would surpass 2016, which came during the last big El Nino.
El Ninos, as I've mentioned so many times I feel like I'm living the movie "Groundhog Day," boosts global temperatures. El Nino works in conjunction with climate change to break many record high temperatures across the Globe.
Since El Nino is expected to last at least through the winter, expect more global - and local - high temperature records in the coming months.
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