August 2005 was globally the third warmest August on record

[Viking12]

Behind 1998, 2003. Given the figures through the first 8 months of the year, looks like 2005 could challenge the top of the charts.

Note: The data in the chart represents temperature anomolies as compared to the 1951-1980 baseline. Each whole number on the chart represents .01 degree c (72= .72 degrees above the 1951-1980 baseline).

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts.txt

[phantom power]

1. And the top-2 were pretty damned recent.

For anybody who doubts global warming, there's an easy home-experiment: spend a week or two watching the Weather-channel's "record hi/lo" data. Two patterns are obvious.

1) the record highs are almost always more recent than the record lows. (I've seen only 2 or 3 exceptions in the last year).

2) The record highs are almost always very recent. Within the last 10 or 20 years, at most.