According to data released on Monday by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York (GISS), last month was the hottest September in the last 136 years — when comprehensive temperature records started being kept.
The good news — and it’s not really good news — is that September was only the hottest by the narrowest of margins, beating out September 2014 by 0.004 degrees Celsius. In fact, the two months are in a statistical tie.
The bad news is that September’s data means that a full 11 of the last 12 months have set temperature records. And this September was nearly one degree warmer than the mean September temperature from 1951-1980.
GISS director Gavin Schmidt went out of his way to stress “that while monthly rankings are newsworthy, they are not nearly as important as long-term trends.” Not that those “long-term trends” are any less scary.
