GISS: +0.61C, 4th warmest August on record

From the third warmest July (+0.59C) to the fourth warmest August, the persistence of Nina-ish conditions does not seem to be helping cool this torrid summer. (H/t to the sharp eyes of Quark Soup.)

Have a kind thought for fire fighters in Texas, coping with the worst of all possible worlds: record heat (thanks to global warming), record drought (thanks to La Nina and, again, global warming), and vicious cuts to fire services that have left firefighters ponying up for their own gear (thanks to a jackass climate denier governor whose prayers for rain have gone unanswered -- apparently Perry is not familiar with the old saw that God helps those that help themselves.)

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.