It's Official: January Was World's Hottest, Continuing Alarming Long Trend Of Hottest Months

January was the world's warmest on record, according
to NOAA and other climate measuring agencies.
It was the eight consecutive record hottest 
month for Planet Earth.

January, 2024 was the hottest on record for the world, says NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. 

It beat out January, 2016, which was itself so ridiculously higher than the previous record that I thought it might be more than a decade or perhaps as much as two decades before we had another record hot January. 

Guess I was wrong!    

January, 2024 was 0.7 degrees Fahrenheit above the previous record warm January back in 2016.  That margin sounds like the tiniest trifle, but on a global scale, that's a pretty wide margin for breaking a world heat record. 

January was also - incredibly - the eighth consecutive month that the world had a record high temperature. 

If you are younger than 48 years old, you've never seen a global January that was at least marginally colder than the 20th century average.

The hottest areas relative to average were the Arctic, northeastern North America, central Russia, the Mideast, almost all of South America most of Asia except an area centered around India and western Africa. 

Here's an interesting tidbit from the NCEI:

"Record warm temperatures covered approximately 12.3% of the world's surface this January, which is the highest percentage for January since the start of records in 1951 and 2.5 percent higher than the previous record of 9.8% in 2016."

If you were looking for cool spots in the world they were few and far between in January. The only chilly areas relative to average were  in northwestern North America, parts of the central and southern United States, parts of Scandinavia, a little bit of Siberia, and notably Antarctica, which managed to have its fifth coldest January on record. 

Even with that summer chill in Antarctica, sea ice extent in the region was the fifth lowest on record. And despite the warmth in much of the Arctic, sea ice extent up there in January was only a little below average. 

Scientists are saying this year has a 22 percent chance of beating out 2023 as the world's hottest year on record. I think the odds of that happening were pegged a little higher in previous months, but lately we've seen the revelation that the end of El Nino seems like it's on the horizon within the next few months. 

Still, with 11 months yet to go this year, the scientists give 2024 a 99 percent chance of being among the top five warmest years on record. 

El Nino tends to increase global temperatures. The reason why this string of recent months have been at record high levels is because El Nino was working in concert with climate change to really boost temperatures. 

We obviously have an unmistakeable warming trend in the world in the age of climate change, but precipitation trends are more murky.

Climate change is increasing the odds of more and more severe droughts in various parts of the world, but it's also increasing the odds that storms and certain weather patterns cause heavier rains than in the past. 

For what it's worth, global precipitation was nearly at a record high level in January. This right after a record wet global December.  

As is pretty much always the case, other organizations that measure global climate agreed with NCEI.  The Japan Meteorological Agency and the European Copernicus Climate Change Service also said  January,2024 was the world's hottest.