February may have been the warmest such month on record, but we don't know for sure — despite reports to the contrary

Portrait of a warming planet. (Animation of false-color images acquired by the Himawari-8 satellite on Feb. 18, 2016. Note Cyclone Winston swirling on the right. Source: NOAA/RAMMB/RAMSDIS) This past February was plenty warm, and the Arctic was particularly so. In fact, measurements taken at Earth's surface may ultimately show that last month was warmer than any previous February in records stretching back more than a hundred years. But unlike what you may have read in recent days, we don't really know that yet. And claims that this shows global warming has gone into overdrive are overblown.

Source: Roy Spencer/University of Alabama True, February apparently was the warmest such month ever in the satellite record. (See thumbnail at right.) And as my colleague Andrew Freedman points out at Mashable, this deals a setback to people, including some presidential candidates, "who frequently cite the satellite record of atmospheric temperatures as evidence that human-caused global warming either doesn't exist or is far smaller than scientists claim." But this record stretches back only to 1979. And satellites monitor temperatures up in the troposphere, not on the surface where we live. Official analyses of data collected during February at thesurface of the Earth — traditionally the scientific gold standard for measuring global warming — have not yet been completed. That did not stop Slate from claiming in an article widely circulated on social media that surface warming in February broke all records, showing that "global warming is going into overdrive." Maybe. But maybe not. To make his case, Eric Holthaus, the author of the story, chose analyses that turn out to be based on an inherently unreliable dataset for evaluating long-term climate change. Moreover, the story inaccurately reports that El Niño likely gave only a small boost to warming last month. Actually, in all likelihood it gave quite a bit more of a boost than Holthaus claims.