It Goes On And On; Global, U.S. October Continues Climate Change Meltdown

 As we do every month, we check out the data NOAA provides to find out how the U.S. and the world did with their weather and climate the previous month. 

Another very red global monthly climate map as
October was the world's second warmest on record.

For years now, these monthly reports have been almost exclusively bad news regarding climate change. 

Why break from tradition now? The news for October was crappy, too! 

THE WORLD

October turned out to be the world's second warmest on record, just a tiny smidge cooler than October 2023.

You might remember that this September ended 15 months of consecutive warmest months, as September was only second warmest. We're doing the same in October.

Sort of. Land areas had their warmest October on record. But oceans only had their second warmest October, so that dragged the entire world's average for the month down to second warmest. 

This tiny "cooling trend" if you want to call it that, was expected. An El Nino - which boosts global temperatures beyond even what climate change can do -- ended a few months ago. So I guess we've stopped breaking some records. At least for now. 

As has been the case for a long time now, it was hard to find notable cool spots in the world in October.

An area in and near the southern tip of South American was sort of cool. Along with a corner of Antarctica.  And a little area in the North Atlantic between southeastern Greenland and Iceland. 

Even that chillyish spot near Iceland is bad news.  It's another symptom of melt water from the ice caps of Greenland and elsewhere in the Arctic flowing into the North Atlantic. This is decreasing salinity in the region's water.

That has scientists worried the melt and changes will make a large, crucial Atlantic current system to collapse, causing abrupt  climate changes in Europe and elsewhere many orders of magnitude worse than anything we've seen since humans have been around. 

In October, most of the Arctic, the southwestern U.S., northern Mexico, parts of India and Pakistan, and a few pockets of Africa and South America had a record warm October.

 Other parts of the world that were way, way warmer than the 20th century average include most of South America, the  central and northeastern United States, sections of North Africa, huge swaths of Europe, the southern half of Asia, most of Australia and western Antarctica. 

I write pretty much the following sentence virtually every month, but I vaguely remember when I used the number 35 in it. But here goes: If you are younger than 48 years old, you've never seen a global October that was cooler than the 20th century average. 

The year to date (January-October) is the world's warmest on record by a wide margin. Basically, unless a big asteroid hits Earth any minute now, 2024 will be world's hottest on record. 

UNITED STATES

Just as you probably thought, October was super warm and dry in the Lower 48 of the United States. Officially, it was second warmest on record and tied for second driest. 

Almost all counties in Lower 48 were warmer than average
in October (orange and red shadings) Only a handful
were near average (in white). Even in warmer than
normal months, a few areas of the nation are cooler
than average. Not in October, 2024!

Pretty much everybody was warm in the United States in October, but as usual, some areas were toastier than others. Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Utah had their warmest October in at least 130 years. 

California, Colorado, Montana and Wyoming had their second warmest October. Ten other states were also in the top 10 ranking for hottest October. 

New Jersey and Delaware had their driest October on record. 

The first ten months of 2024 are the Lower 48's second warmest on record. Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin are all  had their warmest year to date through October. 

To nobody's surprise, November nationally and globally has been running hot so far. I'm sure we'll have a similar post in November telling everyone how hot and sweaty the month is.

These monthly climate posts on the state of the global and United States climate might seem tedious broken record type things,

But they serve an important purpose. It drives home the fact that climate change is roaring on, it's not abating and the effects are worsening. No matter who puts their head in the sand over this issue, the world needs to face reality.

I'm waiting to see if we step up to the plate or not.