January 2024 was the warmest on record globally in my DIYDIY Do It Yourself Global Temperature series. That makes it eight consecutive months of record global temperatures. It wasn’t by such as a wide margin as in some of the other months, the January mean of 9.15°C was just was just 0.03°C higher than that of 2016. The 365 day moving average is still skyrocketing as you can see in the chart below.
In January daily global temperatures have struggled to be the highest on record, vieing at times with January 2016 to be the warmest, no doubt due to the El NinoEl Niño El Niño 'The Boy' is the warm phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and is associated with a band of warm ocean water that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific fading and helping to bring global temperatures back to some kind of normalcy after eight months of craziness.
The cause of the recent surge in global temperatures looks likely to have been the very high SSTSST Sea Surface Temperatures in the world’s oceans, led in no small part by El Nino in the central Pacific as you can see in this graph.
