Hot July: GISS anomaly is 0.60C, third hottest on record

It's like global warming or something. 2009 (0.66C) and mighty 1998 (0.65C) share the podium.

Right now we are just peeking at the middle of the solar cycle:



And La Nina, recently ended, is probably exerting some cooling effect on temperatures, but is fading, without being replaced by a strong El Nino effect:



So very naively, what we might expect to see in the coming months, with these two major sources of short-term variability running close to average, is something resembling the underlying trend since the GISS baseline was set at the 1951-1980 average. Plug 0.60C into that, and it comes out to about 0.16C/decade, right where the models predict it would be.

That's the lovely thing about real science: the numbers actually add up.