It’s spring in Madrid, Spain, and it’s only mid-February Marcos del Mazo/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

It’s official: February was the most anomalously warm month on record, smashing the record just set by January 2016, according to figures released by NASA.

February 2016 was 1.35 °C warmer than the 1951 to 1980 average for the month – the biggest monthly temperature anomaly in NASA’s record, which goes back to 1880. It eclipses the previous biggest anomaly seen in January 2016, which was 1.13 °C warmer than the January average.

The Arctic was the most unusually warm region, with parts of North America and Eurasia experiencing temperatures more than 4 °C above the average for February.


The new record does not mean the world is now at its hottest since records began. Because land cools much faster than water and there is so much land in the northern hemisphere, global average surface temperatures decline slightly during the northern winter.

The warmest global surface temperatures since civilisation began were recorded in July 2015. However, it is possible July 2016 might be even hotter.

The UK Met Office predicts that 2016 will be the warmest year on record, with average global surface temperatures reaching around 1.1 °C above pre-industrial levels – ominously close to the 1.5 °C margin that world leaders agreed we should not exceed in Paris in December.

In reality, there is already enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to take us past 1.5 °C, and atmospheric CO 2 levels are not only still rising but rising faster than ever.

The reason for the record-smashing warmth is the combination of the long-term warming due to rising CO 2 levels plus the ongoing El Niño. Annual global surface temperatures are likely to decline slightly after the El Niño is over, as happened after the last big El Niño in 1998, but in the next decade or so they will permanently pass the current level of record warmth.

It is possible that we have entered a phase of rapid warming – call it a warming speed-up – that could continue for a decade or more.