This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated.

NEW ORLEANS (WGNO) – August 2016 will go down in the record books as the hottest August since modern record-keeping began in 1881.

In fact, the month of August also tied this past July as the hottest month period in that time frame and continues the streak of hottest months seen since last October. What that means is last October was the hottest October since 1881, last November was the hottest November since 1881, and so forth and so on.  The tweet by NASA Earth below illustrates this temperature climb on a graph and makes it easier to see:

You may notice when looking at the data that the monthly averages are varying only by at most a few hundredths of a degree Celsius.

What’s more important to realize is the overall pattern over a series of decades. The hundredths of a degree add up and represent a relatively quick warm-up of the planet’s atmosphere – “relatively” being a key word as a degree or two change overall makes a significant difference.

While the cause of the warm-up is still being debated, what a vast majority of scientists  agree on is that the Earth is getting hotter. The debate lies in how much of that rise in temperature is cause by mankind’s activities and how much of it we can increase or decrease by changing our activities.