Reliable, official numbers now in for February 2016 show that it smashed the previous record for the month

Pattern of temperature anomalies across the globe in February 2016. The month was the warmest on record. (Source: NASA GISS) | Please see important correction at end | Earlier this month, a spate of headlines proclaimed that February 2016 was the warmest such month on record for the globe. At that time, I wrote that we should wait until official, reliable analyses were in before drawing any final conclusions. SEE ALSO:February may have been the warmest on record, but we don't know for sure — despite reports to the contrary The first of those reliable analyses has just been released, and it shows that this past month did indeed set a new record for warmest February in a record extending back to 1880. According to the analysis by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, this past month was 1.35 degrees C (2.43 F) warmer than the month's long-term average (measured between 1951 and 1980). February's spike was not just a one-off. January also set a record. In fact, we've now experienced a string of five record-setting months in a row. But the increase temperature anomaly spike seen last month was particularly steep. As Gavin Schmidt, head of NASA GISS, put it on Twitter today: "Normally I don't comment on individual months (too much weather, not enough climate), but last month was special." According to Gerald Meehl, a research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the odds of monthly records being set are raised right now, thanks to "the juxtaposition of a large El Niño and ongoing human-caused warming." A spike of El Niño warmth has, in fact, occurred atop the long-term global warming trend-line. But as the string of recent monthly records suggests, that trend line also seems to be angling sharply upward now, after what many climate scientists regard as a multi-year period of slower warming. But Meehl also cautions that we should not expect each successive month necessarily to be warmer than the preceding one. That's in part because El Niño's fade — as this one appears to be doing. And they often transition into La Niña, the opposite of an El Niño, resulting in cooling. Moreover, climate can be quite labile, with natural variation causing lots of ups and downs.

In anticipation of the release of NASA's climate analysis for February (a second one from NOAA will follow soon), I've been in touch with six scientists to get their perspectives on a number of issues, including these: