Meanwhile, Outside

It's that time of the month.

From the climate scientists at NOAA:

The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for October 2017 was 0.73°C (1.31°F) above the 20th century average of 14.0°C (57.1°F). This value tied with 2003 as the fourth highest October temperature on record since global records began in 1880, behind 2015 (+1.0°C / +1.8°F), 2014 (+0.79°C / +1.42°F), and 2016 (+0.74°C / +1.33°F). The 10 warmest Octobers on record have all occurred during the 21st century, specifically since 2003. October 2017 also marks the 41st consecutive October and the 394th consecutive month with temperatures at least nominally above the 20th century average.

And that's just for the month of October.

For the year-to-date, the picture is this:

Averaged as a whole, the January–October 2017 global land and ocean surface temperature was the third highest for January–October since global records began in 1880 at 0.86°C (1.55°F) above the 20th century average of 14.1°C (57.4°F), behind 2016 (highest) and 2015 (second highest). Nine of the 10 warmest January-October global land and ocean temperatures occurred during the 21st century (since 2005), with only one year from the 20th century (1998) among the top 10. With two months remaining, the 2017 global land and ocean temperature will likely end among the three highest in the 138-year record.

The global land surface temperature was 1.33°C (2.39°F) above the 20th century average of 9.3°C (48.7°F) and the second highest January–October temperature since global records began in 1880, behind 2016. The global ocean surface temperature was the third highest such period at 0.68°C (1.22°F) above the 20th century average of 16.1°C (61.0°F), behind 2016 and 2015.

On the other hand, on recent NYTimes Op-Ed page we read:

The Trump administration is making it harder to find government information about climate change on the web. If you searched Google for the words “climate change” a little over six months ago, one of the first hits would have been the Environmental Protection Agency’s website.

But that was before April 28, when the agency began systematically dismantling its climate change website, which had survived Democratic and Republican administrations and was a leading source of information on a global problem that the president, as a candidate, labeled “a hoax.”

If you search those words today, a link to the E.P.A. site may not appear until the second or third search results page.

When you do get to the EPA webpate, you see these words:

This page is being updated.

Thank you for your interest in this topic. We are currently updating our website to reflect EPA's priorities under the leadership of President Trump and Administrator Pruitt. If you're looking for an archived version of this page, you can find it on the January 19 snapshot.

However, if you do want to hunt down some pre-inaugural science, you might just come up empty as the Trump/Pruitt EPA has been scrubbing the site of actual science.

Meanwhile, it's still getting warmer out there. From a recent Governmental report (based on science rather than Trumpian non-science):

Many lines of evidence demonstrate that it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. Formal detection and attribution studies for the period 1951 to 2010 find that the observed global mean surface temperature warming lies in the middle of the range of likely human contributions to warming over that same period. We find no convincing evidence that natural variability can account for the amount of global warming observed over the industrial era. For the period extending over the last century, there are no convincing alternative explanations supported by the extent of the observational evidence. Solar output changes and internal variability can only contribute marginally to the observed changes in climate over the last century, and we find no convincing evidence for natural cycles in the observational record that could explain the observed changes in climate.

A warmer planet and human influence is the dominant cause.