NASA is in with the latest reliable data on global warming, and it turns out that February did indeed obliterate a century of global temperature records by a "stunning" margin.  Looks like we're all going to have to get some taller thermometers.

Earlier this month, CareerSpot Global News reported that climate journalists making their own observations saw that February 2016 was likely somewhere between 1.15 and 1.4 C degrees warmer than the long-term average.  And the official call is on the high side of that range:  NASA now says the average global surface temperature in February was 1.35 C degrees warmer than the average temperature for the month between 1951-1980, a far bigger margin than ever seen before. The previous record, set just one month earlier in January, was 1.15C above the long-term average for that month.

Climate scientists usually don't get flustered by one month's data - after all, it's all about trends and trajectories.  But the jump was too much to discount.

"February dispensed with the one-month-old record by a full 0.21 C degrees - an extraordinary margin to beat a monthly world temperature record by," wrote said Jeff Masters and Bob Henson, who analyzed the data on the Weather Underground website.  "Perhaps even more remarkable is that February 2015 crushed the previous February record (set during the peak of the 1997-98 El Nino) by a massive 0.47 C," they added.

Overall, it means that what we've been doing to stop greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming has not been enough. 

"For all the effort we are putting into trying to avoid increases of emission, we are losing'" said Australia's chief scientist Dr. Alan Finkel in an interview with the ABC.  "What we are doing with solar, wind, changing practices, behavioral practices and things like that, we're not winning the battle."