2017 hotter than 2016?

We've had two (or three, depending on who calculates it)  successive years of record global temperatures, and expectations were that 2017 would show a retreat from the 2016 highs.  But so far -- and yes, we've only had two months of data -- it looks as if 2017 could be another record.  Normally, after an El Niño ends, global temperatures fall back to or below the longer-term underlying uptrend.  This hasn't happened this time.  El Niño has ended but the temperature anomaly has actually risen.

Just a reminder: Berkeley Earth was set up by Richard Muller who doubted that global warming was happening.  He was even funded by the Koch brothers.  The denialists promised faithfully that they would accept whatever he found, convinced that the evidence of rising temperatures from everyone else was because they were biased and were cooking the books.  So Muller went away and totally reconstructed the temperature record down to the level of individual weather stations.  And came up with pretty much the same picture.  The denialists, needless to say, did not accept these results.  Muller also looked at correlations, and the only data which fitted the rising chart was the level of atmospheric CO2 (with positive sign) and volcanic eruptions (with a negative sign).

It's not statistical evidence (we'd need several more years of data to be sure) but it looks to me as if the rate of increase in global temps may be accelerating.  And that is very bad news indeed.

Source: Zeke Hausfather, Berkeley Earth