El Niño 'supersizing' before our eyes

 From The Guardian

The El Niño climate phenomenon is “supersizing before our eyes”, the UN has said. The event is near certain to shatter temperature records, according to the latest forecasts.

The El Niño is likely to be the largest in at least 1,000 years and will pile extra heat into an atmosphere where temperatures are already rising rapidly due to global heating. The combination means 2027 is set to “blow apart” the record and be the hottest year ever recorded.

The rising heat from the El Niño is already having impacts, from worsening wildfires in Indonesia to the weakening of vital monsoon rains in India. The impacts will spread globally, from greater fire risk in Australia to more intense floods in South America. The World Food Programme said in August that the El Niño was likely to push about 50 million people into acute hunger.

The climate crisis, caused by pollution from fossil fuels, is already supercharging extreme weather and killing people, with the most extreme heatwave ever recorded hitting Europe this summer and leading to at least 35,000 deaths. The El Niño will ratchet up the impacts even further, with the scale of the event having been described as “truly mind-blowing” and a “Godzilla-level” event.

El Niño is a natural climate cycle where wind changes over the Pacific lead to rising ocean temperatures and the transfer of huge amounts of heat to the atmosphere. The most recent data, from Monday, shows the temperature of the ocean at the heart of El Niño at 2.6C above the 30-year average. That is already close to the highest anomaly ever recorded in the satellite data era, 3.1C in 2015, with months to go before the peak is expected.

That peak is forecast to reach about 4C in November, according to the average of 14 different models. Data from analysis of corals, tree rings and historical documents suggest no El Niño has reached this level in the last millennium, said Zeke Hausfather, a climate analyst. Any temperature anomaly above 0.5C is classed as an El Niño.

A further concern is that recent research shows global heating is now intensifying El Niño cycles, which then in turn intensify the impacts of the climate crisis.

“El Niño is being supersized before our eyes,” said UN secretary general António Guterres. “The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up. The world is in the danger zone of extreme weather. The race now is between rising risks and our commitment to take climate action and protect people. We must win that race.”

The WMO El Niño updates are the world’s most authoritative forecasts and are based on a consensus of models from climate prediction centres around the world. The latest update, published on Thursday, said the El Niño was firmly established and would intensify into a “very strong event” in the coming months, with “big impacts” including floods, drought and extreme heat continuing well into 2027.

In some areas, subsurface ocean temperatures were an extraordinary 8C above average during July and early August.

Chris Jaccarini, of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit in the UK, said: “Extreme [weather] around the world has driven up food prices, hitting the poorest hardest. This is not just the food we import, but also what we grow at home.

“After five heatwaves and widespread drought, British arable farmers are now facing the worst harvest on record in 2026. And yet, without action, these could be the good years. Unless we rapidly cut emissions and strengthen resilience, climate change impact will continue to worsen with El Niño turbocharging the trend every few years.”

Yet governments are not 'supersizing' their efforts to slash emissions.

We could, for example, ban the import/production of pure petrol/diesel vehicles, allowing only hybrids and EVs.  After five years we would also ban hybrids, except for EREV*s. 

We could give electricity utilities a renewable energy target (RET), starting at the current average for the industry, for example, 40%, and upping it each year by 10%.  Utilities which don't reach this rising annual target each year would be required to buy surplus credits from those which have reached it, or from the government.  

We could ban new oil and gas heating for buildings, and subsidise heat pumps.  Together, all these steps could cut emissions by ~60%.   

But, paralysed by fossil fuel company funding and lobbyists, governments take none of these steps, even though the vast majority of their citizens are terrified of climate collapse and want something to be done.

Unless we act, we face catastrophe.

Upcoming El Niño 4 times hotter

Hat tip to Hal

#ClimateEmergency. #JohnScheve: “.. The strongest #ElNiño ..was 8 to 11 zettajoules ..this El Niño could reach .. 38 zettajoules .. 4 times the ..heat content.. The #GlobalExtremeWeather impacts.. catastrophic.. We are in #RunawayWarming.” www.facebook.com/share/p/1DWo...

2027 could reach or exceed 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels.

Sea surface temperature's new all time record

 From Scott Horton

According to ERA5 global sea surface temperatures have set a new all time record. This is likely the warmest sea surface temperatures have been in at least the last 125,000 years. What’s more concerning is this will likely rise further in the coming months.

And this is before El Niño's impact reaches its maximum next year, which could be another 2 degrees. We face climate catastrophe, and we don't act.

Insane temperature increase next year

 From Zeke Hausfather

I'm not sure folks have realized just how crazy the second half of 2026 and 2027 will be for global temperatures – on the back of a record-smashing El Niño event. Here is my latest estimate of where both years will end up compared to global temperatures since 1850.

We're racing towards 2 degrees increase in temperatures since the 19th century.  And look how bad things already are.  The rate of increase is accelerating. 

Yet our politicians and CEOs lie to us, pretend to care, but take no action to slash emissions.  

Ocean temperatures reach June record high

From The Guardian

Temperatures on the ocean surface have hit a record high, raising fears of another burst of extreme heat this summer.

On 21 June, temperatures outside the polar regions exceeded the extraordinary highs observed at the same time in 2023 and 2024, the Copernicus Climate Change Service said on Wednesday.

It warned the new peak would probably bring “consequences for weather patterns, global climate and marine ecosystems”, not least because it would coincide with the earliest phases of an El Niño event they forecast to be the strongest in decades.

When the previous ocean record for June was set in 2023, scientists described the trends as “worrying”, “terrifying” and “bonkers” because they were so far outside their expectations. That presaged an El Niño and a period of devastating global heatwaves, floods and storms.

That 2023 record has now been surpassed and much of the world is once again seeing an alarming rise in temperatures. Last month, the UK and many other countries in Europe sweltered amid new heat records while Antarctica experienced unprecedentedly balmy winter conditions.

Although the focus is usually on land temperatures, oceans give a fuller picture of how much the climate is being pushed out of balance by human-caused warming.

Surface temperatures are affected by solar radiation, water currents and the buildup of heat in the depths.

Oceans absorb more than 90% of the excess energy in the Earth system, which is primarily caused by burning fossil fuels, such as oil, coal and gas. That imbalance hit a record 23 zettajoules last year, more than double the average of the previous two decades.

As a result, the oceans are warming at an accelerating rate. In 2020, the amount of heat being added to the oceans was equivalent to about five Hiroshima bombs a second. Last year, it was closer to 11 Hiroshima explosions a second. The UN’s secretary general, António Guterres, has warned “Earth is being pushed beyond its limits”.

Scientists said it was too early to say whether the sea surface heating would prove temporary or even worsen because annual peaks are usually registered in July and August.

But Carlo Buontempo, Copernicus director at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, warned it could indicate the beginning of a new phase, leading, once more, to uncharted territory: “With ocean temperatures at these levels and El Niño on the horizon, we are likely to see more temperature records fall in the coming months.”

Copernicus is part of the EU’s space programme.

We are not helpless.  

We can replace coal and gas power stations with wind, solar and batteries to at least 90% of total electricity generation.  We can replace petrol and diesel in land transport, in cars, light trucks, and buses, and we can switch diesel trains to bi-mode trains.  We can replace oil and gas heating with electric heating and/or heat pumps.  And 40% of all shipping emissions are produced just delivering fossil fuels around the world.   

Also, you can personally change things too.  Get balcony plug-in solar.  Get home plug-in batteries.  Nag your government until they make them legal.  Vote, vote, vote.  Stop eating meat, and if that's too hard, stop eating beef and mutton.  If you can afford it, when you replace your car, get an EV.  Outside the US, their up-front cost is now as low as petrol cars, and their running costs are much lower.

And you won't be spitting into the wind, because the world's biggest carbon-emitter, China, has probably peaked its emissions.  Even in Trump's US, though abolishing the incentives to switch to green alternatives has slowed bettrification down, EV sales have started to rise, and most of new generation capacity this year is renewables.  

Fossil fuel companies and the Right want us to give up.  Don't.

It's happening—a super El Niño is coming

 

A clear and excellent explanation of El Niño, and why it's likely to be so bad this time.   Ben Miles is usually quite optimistic.  This time, he struggles to find something hopeful to say.  The world faces famine and climate disaster.  Are politicians planning for this?  Are you?  And what are we doing to reduce global heating, which is making this worse?

European heatwave

 From The BBC

This El Niño will take temperatures to new highs. The acceleration in recent years is obvious, and I've talked about it before.  The trend will continue.

Will this latest heatwave encourage politicians to do more?  Don't count on it.

A humungous El Niño is on the way

From Zack Labe

Sea surface temperatures are already surging to record high levels for this time of year in key El Niño monitoring areas.

This will prolly push global temperatures towards 1.7 degrees above pre-industrial (1850-1900) levels. This is releasing heat into the atmosphere already accumulated in the sea, so it doesn't change the underlying trajectory — though it may move some world climate systems past tipping points — but it will still deliver terrible heatwaves, droughts, bushfires and floods. And meanwhile the underlying temperature is continuing to rise, and its increase appears to have been accelerating.

The next el Niño---James Hansen

 From James Hansen's Climate Uncensored Substack

You can read the full article yourself, and I'll just post the main chart and the conclusion here.

Fig. 1. Global surface temperature (relative to 1880-1920 base period).[1]
click on chart to enlarge

 Abstract: 

The world seems headed into another El Niño, just 3 years after the last one. Such quick return normally would imply, at most, an El Niño of moderate strength, but we suggest that even a moderately strong El Niño may yield record global temperature already in 2026 and still greater temperature in 2027. The extreme warming will be a result mainly of high climate sensitivity and a recent increase of the net global climate forcing, not the result of an exceptional El Niño, per se. We find that the principal drive[r] for global warming acceleration began in about 2015, which implies that 2°C global warming is likely to be reached in the 2030s, not at midcentury.

The key lines on the chart are the 1970-2010 linear trend, of an increase of 0.18 C per decade, the linear trend from 2010 to the present of 0.3 C per decade (last 15 years) and the linear trend from 2015 to date of 0.41 C per decade.

It's really a clear-cut proposition:  either we slash emissions very fast, or there will be climate catastrophe.  Yes, emissions have probably peaked, but they're only likely to fall slowly at first, and for the rate of increase in temperatures to slow to, say, 0.1 C per decade, we will need to cut emissions by 2/3rds or 3/4qtrs.

Can we do that?  

The chart below, from Our World in Data, shows emissions by sector, which includes direct emissions, as well as indirect emissions.  For example, you could be burning oil directly to heat your house, or using fossil fuels indirectly, via electricity.  Electricity generation produces roughly 30% of global emissions.  Apart from aviation and shipping, almost all of the sectors in the red quadrant can be electrified.  Converting the grid to green tech will be a huge step towards eliminating all emissions from these sectors.

So it is possible.  But that means green electricity, and the electrification of everything.  Wind and solar and batteries instead of coal and gas power stations, plus EVs and heat pumps.  Electric trains, electric planes, electric ships.  Chemicals and cement.  Landfill.

And we need to deal with emissions in agriculture.  That will be complicated and will vary by source, so the sooner we start, the better.

It's doable.  But will we do it?  It's up to us.

Source: Our World in Data

 

Third hottest September ever

From Berkeley Earth.

This chart shows the temperature anomaly relative to the 1850 -1900 September average temperature, for each September since 1850.  You can see how temperatures spiked during El Niño, and have since been falling as El Niño was replaced by La Niña.  The red line shows the trend, which you can see is accelerating.  This is the third-warmest September on record.

September 2025 was the third warmest September on record behind 2023 and 2024, with a global average of 1.48 ± 0.15 °C (2.67 ± 0.26 °F) above the 1850-1900 average.

This chart shows the 12-month moving average of the temperature anomalies up to September 2025.  The 12-month moving average has rolled over after the end of El Niño, but don't mistake this for a change in the longer-term trend, shown by the red LOESS smoothed line.

With the Paris Climate Agreement (COP21), 10 years ago, the world agreed to aim for a maximum increase in temperatures over the 1850-1900 average of 1.5 degrees C.  We're there already, and even though temperatures have fallen marginally from the El Niño high 3 years ago, the trend is inexorably upwards.  We have failed.  COP conferences have turned into pointless gabfests, where lobbyists from fossil fuel industries outnumber government delegates.

Only the continued decline in solar panel, battery and EV costs gives me any hope that mankind will act quickly enough to cut emissions and prevent a climate catastrophe.

Our planet is warming twice as fast as we thought

 A video from Just Have a Think.  He discusses a paper by Grant Foster and Stefan Ramsdorf, which confirms that the rate of global warming has accelerated from 0.2 degrees C per decade to 0.4 degrees C.   One of the authors of this paper is Grant Foster, who is "Tamino'", and I've commented on his pieces published on his blog "Open Mind" several times over the last few years.  See this, and this, and this.

Just Have A Think  explains quite well the techniques used to prove their point.  He cautions that just because temperatures have been rising twice as fast as they were between 1970 and 2010 over the last decade, it doesn't mean that they will necessarily continue to do that.  

On the other hand they might, and they might even accelerate.  Just being prudent and cautious would suggest that we should accelerate our attempts to slash emissions, especially since wind and solar power and batteries and EVs have fallen so much in cost. 

A chart from the paper referred to in the video, showing the unadjusted and the adjusted (for volcanic eruptions, El Niño, and the sunspot cycle) time series from 5 different estimates of the average global temeperature anomaly.

The January global temperature is really, really bad

 From Brian Bretschneider

Global average January temperature - color coded by ENSO status. One of these years is not like the others.

The chart shows the average January temperature for the world. Red dots show El Niño years, blue dots La Niña. During El Niño, air temperatures are higher, as heat is released from the sea. During La Niña, the reverse is true: air temperatures are cooler as more heat is absorbed by the oceans. Notice how temperatures above the trend line are mostly red dots (El Niño), while temperatures below the trend line are mostly blue dots. January 2025 is the glaring exception. It is now a La Niña phase, yet global temperatures moved to a new maximum.

click on chart to enlarge

World temperatures still rising.

From Prof Eliot Jacobson

Daily global surface temperature updates were delayed a few days. They were finally posted this morning. And the records keep on falling. [The *temperatures* keep on rising] 

So glad El Niño is over and La Niña is helping cool things down ...

1.8 degrees above pre-industrial levels.  Yet still we do nothing.

Rise in world's temperatures accelerates

 Open Mind (Tamino) produced a previous piece about the acceleration in the rise in global temperatures, which I reported on here.  He has returned to the analysis, and confirms his position in his latest post. 

I now have global temperature data through October of this year from NASA, NOAA, and ERA5, as well as data through September from HadCRU and Berkeley. I’ve translated them to “since pre-industrial” values using one of the methods in the IPCC special report on 1.5°C. Then I computed yearly averages (this year is incomplete so values for 2024 are year-so-far averages)

There are two clear episodes in this plot: before and after 1975. Before, GMST was fluctuating but not trending either way; since, it has been trending consistenly up and fluctuating. As for its rate of increase, for four and a half decades (from 1975 until 2020) temperature seemed to rise at a pace (about 0.02°C per year) that was unchanging, and statistics couldn’t deny it.

But the last two years (2023 and 2024) have been “off the charts,” so to speak. For the data from ERA5, the value for 2024 year-so-far is already above 1.5°C, which is exactly what the Paris agreement seeks to avoid.

I investigated the rate of warming, and how it may have changed over time, in two ways. First, I fit a modified lowess smooth which I’ve programmed to estimate the rate as well as the value. Second, I computed a piecewise linear fit (PLF) with knots at 1975 and 2010. Both models (lowess and PLF) were fit to the monthly-average data, but in the graphs that follow I’ll plot yearly averages so the graphs will be less cluttered. Here’s how the PLF model fits the data from NASA:

PLF = piecewise linear fit 

 

[....]

For the 45-year period from 1975 through 2009, the average warming rate according to NASA data is just about 0.018°C/yr. For the 15-year period since 2010, it has been a lot faster at 0.031°C/yr. Statistically, the difference is significant at over 99% confidence.

I have also adjusted all the data sets, to compensate for the influence of el Niño, volcanic eruptions, and solar variations, with a method not unlike that of Foster & Rahmstorf (2011). Here are the adjusted temperatures, together with their PLF fit, for the data from NASA:

This chart shows the temperature anomaly adjusted for El Niño/La Niña and for vulcanism. 
PLF = piecewise least fit.

The rate from 1975 to 2010 now seems to be only 0.017°C/yr, and after 2010, the best estimate is 0.033°C/yr. These aren’t much different from the estimates using the raw data, although the uncertainties are now smaller so the confidence intervals are narrower.

Falling emissions (which of course we don't have--emissions continue to rise) do NOT mean that temperatures will start falling.  The RISE in the temperature anomaly is proportional to the LEVEL of emissions.  In other words, for temperatures to stop rising, we need to reduce emissions to zero.  If we halve emissions, the increase in temperature anomaly will halve, but that only reduces it to what it was before this recent acceleration, 0.17 degrees per decade.  

There are positive signs that emissions will peak soon.  Wind and solar continue to expand exponentially.  The costs of battery storage are plunging, and the recent first commercial solid-state battery points to continued and sustained cost declines and efficiency improvements.  Yet, even if we completely switch ALL electricity generation and ALL land transport to carbon-free methods, that will still only halve emissions.  If we were to start cutting emissions by 5% a year, compound, it would take us 40 years to reduce emissions to 10% of current levels.  Assuming we did this (but we are not) temperatures would rise for the next decade by 0.33 degrees, for the decade after by 0.17, by the decade after that by 0.l2 degrees and for the final decade by 0.06.  Roughly.  In other words, temperatures would rise by another 0.33+0.17+0.12+0.06, or ~0.7 degrees, making the rise since 1850-1900, the traditional "pre-industrial" starting point 2.2 degrees.

We face catastrophe, and still we dither and phaff.  The Right is dead against doing anything at all to slash emissions, and the Left argues with itself about what to do.  Meanwhile, we are lied to by corporations and governments, and protesters go to jail while oil execs are fêted.

Climate models can't explain 2023's huge heat anomaly

Source: NOAA
Note: this is relative to 1901-2000 average
Relative to the 1850-1900 average, the anomaly is already over 1.5 degrees C

From Nature, by Gavin Schmidt

When I took over as the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I inherited a project that tracks temperature changes since 1880. Using this trove of data, I’ve made climate predictions at the start of every year since 2016. It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has.

For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records each month by up to 0.2 °C — a huge margin at the planetary scale. A general warming trend is expected because of rising greenhouse-gas emissions, but this sudden heat spike greatly exceeds predictions made by statistical climate models that rely on past observations. Many reasons for this discrepancy have been proposed but, as yet, no combination of them has been able to reconcile our theories with what has happened.

For a start, prevalent global climate conditions one year ago would have suggested that a spell of record-setting warmth was unlikely. Early last year, the tropical Pacific Ocean was coming out of a three-year period of La Niña, a climate phenomenon associated with the relative cooling of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. Drawing on precedents when similar conditions prevailed at the beginning of a year, several climate scientists, including me, put the odds of 2023 turning out to be a record warm year at just one in five.

El Niño — the inverse of La Niña — causes the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean to warm up. This weather pattern set in only in the second half of the year, and the current spell is milder than similar events in 1997–98 and 2015–16.

However, starting last March, sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean began to shoot up. By June, the extent of sea ice around Antarctica was by far the lowest on record. Compared with the average ice cover between 1981 and 2010, a patch of sea ice roughly the size of Alaska was missing. The observed temperature anomaly has not only been much larger than expected, but also started showing up several months before the onset of El Niño.

So, what might have caused this heat spike? Atmospheric greenhouse-gas levels have continued to rise, but the extra load since 2022 can account for further warming of only about 0.02 °C. Other theories put forward by climate scientists include fallout from the January 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai volcanic eruption in Tonga, which had both cooling effects from aerosols and warming ones from stratospheric water vapour, and the ramping up of solar activity in the run-up to a predicted solar maximum. But these factors explain, at most, a few hundredths of a degree in warming (Schoeberl, M. R. et al. Geophys. Res. Lett. 50, e2023GL104634; 2023). Even after taking all plausible explanations into account, the divergence between expected and observed annual mean temperatures in 2023 remains about 0.2 °C — roughly the gap between the previous and current annual record.

There is one more factor that could be playing a part. In 2020, new regulations required the shipping industry to use cleaner fuels that reduce sulfur emissions. Sulfur compounds in the atmosphere are reflective and influence several properties of clouds, thereby having an overall cooling effect. Preliminary estimates of the impact of these rules show a negligible effect on global mean temperatures — a change of only a few hundredths of a degree. But reliable assessments of aerosol emissions rely on networks of mostly volunteer-driven efforts, and it could be a year or more before the full data from 2023 are available.

This is too long a wait. Better, more nimble data-collection systems are clearly needed. NASA’s PACE mission, which launched in February, is a step in the right direction. In a few months, the satellite should start providing a global assessment of the composition of various aerosol particles in the atmosphere. The data will be invaluable for reducing the substantial aerosol-related uncertainty in climate models. Hindcasts, informed by new data, could also provide insights into last year’s climate events.

But it seems unlikely that aerosol effects provide anything close to a full answer. In general, the 2023 temperature anomaly has come out of the blue, revealing an unprecedented knowledge gap perhaps for the first time since about 40 years ago, when satellite data began offering modellers an unparalleled, real-time view of Earth’s climate system. If the anomaly does not stabilize by August — a reasonable expectation based on previous El Niño events — then the world will be in uncharted territory. It could imply that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated. It could also mean that statistical inferences based on past events are less reliable than we thought, adding more uncertainty to seasonal predictions of droughts and rainfall patterns.

Much of the world’s climate is driven by intricate, long-distance links — known as teleconnections — fuelled by sea and atmospheric currents. If their behaviour is in flux or markedly diverging from previous observations, we need to know about such changes in real time. We need answers for why 2023 turned out to be the warmest year in possibly the past 100,000 years. And we need them quickly.

Nature 627, 467 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00816-z

We face a climate catastrophe.  And we are still doing too little to stop it.

2024 likely to be another record year, despite La Niña

From Discover Magazine

As La Niña continues to stir in the tropical Pacific Ocean, the latest analysis shows there’s a 70 percent chance it will develop between August­ and October.

The climate phenomenon shifts the world's atmospheric circulation, changing weather patterns around the globe. Characterized by cooler-than-average sea surface waters in large swaths of the tropical Pacific, it also usually takes the edge off human-caused heating of the planet, albeit temporarily.

But even taking that likely cooling effect into account, a new annual global heating record is very likely in 2024, according Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Schmidt made the prediction on the Bluesky social media platform after his institute's analysis showed last month to be the warmest June on record. It was also the 13th straight month with record-breaking global temperatures. (Other analyses have shown the same, including one released by NOAA today.)

Last year shattered the record for the hottest year globally since record-keeping began in the 1800s. With an El Niño adding to the global heating caused by our continuing emissions of greenhouse gases, a new record in 2023 should not have come as a surprise. But the heat over land and in the seas was so extreme that scientists were nonetheless shocked — and they're still working hard to understand the details of what happened.

Warming rate probably accelerating

 Another in depth statistical analysis from Open Mind (Tamino).  I won't repeat the whole article (best to read it for yourself).   In essence, what he does is look at the change in the temperature anomaly over 30 years, the conventional measure of climate change (because shorter periods are too susceptible to fluctuations from natural climate cycles such as, for example, El Niño/La Niña).    This chart shows what that looks like:

Note that the change over the 30-year span has been centred at 15 years,
which is why it apparently ends at 2009.

He then adjusts the data for volcanic eruptions, El Niño, and the sunspot cycle to test whether the change in trend since 2000 is statistically significant, and concludes that it is.

But wait, there’s more. We know the cause of some of the fluctuation, and we can adjust the data by removing our best estimate of those known factors. In particular, we can remove an estimate of the influence of volanic eruptions, solar variations, and the el Niño southern oscillation, and I’ve done so by a modified version of the method of Foster & Rahmstorf.

Comparing this graph of adjusted data since 1946, to the graph of raw data over the same time (the third graph in this post), two things are obvious. First, the level of scatter (of random fluctuation) is quite a bit less for the adjusted data than for the raw. Second, the “obvious” simple model for the raw data (a linear spline with two straight-line setments) isn’t so obvious for the adjusted data.

The same analysis used on the raw data, returns different results on the adjusted. This is mainly because the uncertainty levels are so much reduced. The warming rate for NASA data, for example, now looks like this:

Again, the change has been centred midway on the 30-year span

The final 30-year estimate suggests the rate was definitely bigger then 0.02°C/year, while the earlier rate is definitely less. Also, the statistical tests (fitting a parabola and a linear spline) now are definitely significant at 95% confidence.

Using adjusted rather than raw data, the same is true for all five data sources. While the significance is weakest for HadCRU and strongest for NOAA, it’s over 95% confidence for all of them. My conclusion is that recent acceleration of global warming isn’t just likely, it’s confirmed.

There is still room for doubt, if you doubt that the adjusted data represent things correctly then the recent apparent acceleration may be just random accident. All told, I find that too unlikely.

See also this piece I did, based on Open Mind's analysis: 

Terrifying acceleration in global heating

We are heading towards climate catastrophe, and still we do not act, stumbling blindly to the precipice.