Hi everyone.
Something has happened that has been swept under the rug on most skeptic blogs. Something I think is hugely significant. is a global sea surface temperature dataset that updates monthly and has data going back to the 19th Century. The numbers for September 2015 were released recently. We are now at an all time record high with the Sea Surface temperature anomaly.
There are a few things that strike me with the above image. For one, you can see how much warmer we are than 1998. 1998 was also a strong El Nino year, and thus would also be favored to be warmer than a neutral ENSO year. However, +ENSO conditions are similar, if not slightly weaker than 97-98 this year, and yet we are still noticeably higher than the peak temperature anomaly in 1998 by about ~0.2 K or so. This is unaccounted for by ENSO alone. Solar has also declined dramatically on average since 1998, and thus cannot explain the warmth relative to 1998. The best explanation for this is continued anthropogenic warming. The hiatus period on the ERSST_v4 dataset is almost non-existent now. I suspect that after this Nino, we will cool back down to a new base-state warmer than the 2000s average, thus essentially continuing the "escalator" upward for the foreseeable future.
Skeptics warned of "Global Cooling" in 2009. When I was a skeptic, I did so as well. But these claims have failed to predict what has actually happened since then. So why do some continue to listen to what these people have to say about future climate change?
Continued ocean warming and sea level rise before this spike in the SST anomaly was an indication that this moment was bound to happen soon with the next significant +ENSO event.
I suspect that we will climb even higher in the Global SST anomaly than where we already are right now for this +ENSO event. El Nino will not be weakening anytime soon, and with a continued westerly wind burst near the dateline, we may see continued intensification.
