Bobcobb, My first language is English, and "highly questionable" is a significant misrepresentation of the statements that Rignot has made. Let it go.

Thankyou Wayne - some of the numbers are worrying. The year over year change for the first 3 months is 3.32ppm in 2016 vs only 2.29ppm in 1998 - so seemingly a bigger CO2 response to the same scale and timing of the El Nino. Also, the temperature change between the two El Nino events (handily removing the ENSO variability) works out at 0.25 degrees C per decade. Of course, still early days in the year.

Climate reanalyzer is forecasting intense heat anomalies over Greenland and the Kara Sea, building from April 23rd onwards. http://cci-reanalyzer.org/Forecasts/#ARC-LEA An area from the Kara Sea out to Severnaya Zemlya and Franz Joseph Land, plus Baffin Bay next to Greenland, will have air temperatures above zero.

The 1997/98 and 2015/16 El Nino's are a very close match, both in peak temperature for N3.4 and the month of peak, plus lagged relative atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature anomalies. See page 10 and page 21 at: http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf From a year over year increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide content (at Manua Loa), they are quite close. In a couple of weeks in September 1998 the year over year change was above 4.5ppm! So we may have even higher numbers coming later this year. ftp://aftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/products/trends/co2/co2_weekly_mlo.txt Relative global temperature anomalies in the first few months of 1998 and 2016 also seem to match. The northern hemisphere anomalies, versus global, are much higher though this year than in 1998 - by between 0.3 and 0.4 degrees. In 1998 the high temperature anomalies kept going through August, so could be a pretty hot northern melt season. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/ (scroll down and open up the global mean monthly psv file, then the northern hemisphere mean psv file). At the global level CO2 levels increased 1.96 ppm in 1997 (from 1.08 the previous year), and 2.82 in 1998. As the increase was 3.00ppm in 2015, could be over 4ppm in 2016? http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/global.html Post 1998 the CO2 and temperature anomalies regressed to the trend. If this is all just noise in the trend, do we get a new "hiatus" for the deniers to trumpet a few years from now?

Tp AbbottisGone: There is a lag between the warmth in the N3.4 equatorial region in the Pacific, and the sub-tropical and extra-tropical areas. This paper covers some of the proposed mechanisms: http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/papers/jgr2001b/jgr2.html

The increase is actually 3.4ppm (403.28-399.88). During the last "super" El Nino of 1997/98, it was the second year (when it peaked and declined) that was the worst for the increase in atmospheric carbon. So a bigger than 2015 jump may be expected this year. Perhaps to do with the lag in heat transferring from the southern ocean to the northern hemisphere. I have seen 6 months stated for this, which would make the northern summer very hot (have to remember the reference), not good for arctic ice melt. Hopefully the first half of April's Manua Loa readings are not a harbinger for the global ones as they have jumped into the 408-9 range.

The NOAA global estimate for 2015 CO2 is 2.73, compared to the 3.17 for Mauna Loa. The difference between the two numbers does bounce around a bit from year to year. These are preliminary numbers and can get revised by a few tenths either way. http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/index.html The last big El Nino year (1998), produced a jump in CO2 atmospheric concentrations, so any extrapolations could be very misleading.