January's temperatures set worldwide record

Land temperatures were 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit higher than normal last month.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- It may be cold comfort during a frigid February, but last month was by far the hottest January ever.
The broken record was fueled by a waning El Ni & ntilde;o and a gradually warming world, according to U.S. scientists who reported the data Thursday. Records on the planet's temperature have been kept since 1880.
Spurred on by unusually warm Siberia, Canada, northern Asia and Europe, the world's land areas were 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit higher than a normal January, according to the U.S. National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. That didn't just nudge past the old record set in 2002, but broke that mark by 0.81 degrees, which meteorologists said is a lot, since such records often are broken by hundredths of a degree at a time.
"That's pretty unusual for a record to be broken by that much," said the data center's scientific services chief, David Easterling.
The scientists went beyond their normal double-checking and took the unusual step of running computer climate models "just to make sure that what we're seeing was real," Easterling said. It was.
"From one standpoint it is not unusual to have a new record because we've become accustomed to having records broken," said Jay Lawrimore, climate monitoring branch chief. But January, he said, was a bigger jump than the world has seen in about 10 years.
Combined readings
The temperature of the world's land and water combined -- the most effective measurement -- was 1.53 degrees Fahrenheit higher than normal, breaking the old record by more than one-quarter of a degree. Ocean temperatures alone didn't set a record.
In the Northern Hemisphere, land areas were 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal for January, breaking the old record by about three-quarters of a degree.
But the United States was about normal. The nation was 0.94 degrees Fahrenheit above normal for January, ranking only the 49th warmest since 1894.
The world's temperature record was driven by northern latitudes. Siberia was on average 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal. Eastern Europe had temperatures averaging 8 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Canada on average was more than 5 degrees warmer than normal.
Larger increases in temperature farther north, compared with mid-latitudes, is "sort of the global warming signal," Easterling said. It is what climate scientists predict happens and will happen more frequently with global warming, according to an authoritative report by hundreds of climate scientists issued this month.
Meteorologists aren't putting blame for the warmer January on global warming alone, but they said the higher temperature was consistent with climate change.
Temperature records break regularly with global warming, Trenberth said, but "with a little bit of El Ni & ntilde;o thrown in, you don't just break records, you smash records."
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