Preliminary February and early March temperatures are in, and it’s now abundantly clear: warming .

As of 3 March, it appears that average temperatures across the northern hemisphere breached 2°C above pre-industrial levels for the first time in recorded history, and since human civilisation began thousands of years ago.

The 2°C mark has (somewhat arbitrarily) as the point above which climate change may begin to become “” to humanity. It has now arrived – though very briefly and only in the northern hemisphere – much more quickly than anticipated. This is a milestone moment for our species. Climate change deserves our greatest possible attention.

As for the planet as a whole, there are dozens of global temperature datasets, and usually I (and other climate journalists) wait until are released to announce a record-breaking month at the global level. But February’s global data is so extraordinary that there is no need to wait: it obliterated the all-time temperature record .

Using unofficial data and adjusting for different baseline temperatures, it appears that February was somewhere between °C and warmer than the long-term average, and about 0.2°C above January – making it the most above-average month ever measured. (Since the globe had already warmed by about 0.45°C above pre-industrial levels during the 1981-2010 baseline meteorologists commonly use, that amount has been added to the data.)

Stunning rise

Keep in mind that it took from the dawn of the industrial age 2015 to reach the first 1.0°C rise. That means we have come as much as an extra 0.4°C further in just the last five months. Even accounting for the margin of error associated with these preliminary datasets, that means it is virtually certain that February beat the record set in January for the most anomalously warm month for the entire globe ever recorded. That’s stunning.

It also means that for many parts of the northern hemisphere, there basically wasn’t a winter. Parts of the Arctic were more than 16°C warmer than average for February, bringing them a few degrees above freezing, on par with typical June temperatures, in what is often the coldest month of the year.

In the US, the winter was in cities coast to coast. In Europe and Asia, dozens of countries their all-time temperature records for February. In the tropics, the record-warmth is prolonging the .

The northernmost permanent settlement, Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, 10°C above what is usual in winter, with temperatures rising above freezing on 21 days since 1 December. That kind of extremely unusual weather has prompted a , especially in the Barents Sea.

Sceptical converts

The data for February is so overwhelming that even prominent climate change sceptics have embraced the record. Writing , former NASA scientist Roy Spencer said that according to satellite records – the dataset of choice by climate sceptics – February Ěýfeatured “whopping” temperature anomalies, especially in the Arctic.

Spurred by disbelief, Spencer checked his data with others and said the overlap is “about as good as it gets”. Speaking with The Washington Post, the February data proves “there has been warming. The question is how much warming there’s been.”

Of course, all this is happening in the context of , which tends to boost global temperatures for beyond its usual peak at the end of the calendar year – mainly because it takes that long for excess heat to filter its way across the planet from the tropical Pacific Ocean.

But El Niño isn’t entirely responsible for the absurd numbers we are seeing. Its influence on the Arctic and is probably small. In fact, is likely to be small – on the order of 0.1°C or so.

No more normal

What’s actually happening now is the liberation of nearly two decades’ worth of global warming energy since the last major El Niño in 1998.

Numbers like this amount to a step-change in our planet’s climate system. Peter Gleick, a climate scientist at the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California, said it is difficult to compare the current temperature spike: “The old assumptions about what was normal are being tossed out the window… The old normal is gone.”

Almost overnight, the world has moved within arm’s reach of the climate goals negotiated . There, small island nations on the front line of climate change set a global temperature target of no more than 1.5°C rise by the year 2100 as , and that limit was embraced by the global community.

On our current pace, we may reach that level for the first time – though briefly – later this year. In fact, for individual days, we are probably already there. We could now be in the heart of that could kick off with far-reaching implications on our species and the countless others we share the planet with.

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Love in a cold climate

It is designed to speed up the retirement of coal-fired power plants – the most carbon-intensive way of generating electricity – and could the rate of their closures by 2040.

In a , Obama called the Clean Power Plan “the biggest, most important step we’ve ever taken to combat climate change”. While that may be true, it’s not saying a whole heck of a lot.

As I wrote last year when the details were initially announced, many states to achieving the required reductions, thanks in part to a recent boom in cheap natural gas and the Obama administration’s choice of 2005 as the basis year for cuts, which was close to America’s all-time peak in carbon emissions. Obama’s plan is significant, but it’s not bold.

A previous version of the targets, announced last year, would have required states to begin implementing changes to their power-producing mix in 2020. The final version, to be announced today, gives states and utilities an extra two years. The targets will , depending on their current energy mix, and states will have flexible ways of achieving emissions reductions, including an option to join an interstate cap-and-trade scheme.

Business as usual

All this will be for some coal-intensive states, like Wyoming, but it’s being heralded as largely “business as usual” for some states, , that have already made significant efforts to shift their energy mix.

We can, and should, do much more. According to and – which helps keep world leaders honest in the run-up to this year’s international climate negotiations in Paris – the new provision puts America on a middling emissions-reduction pathway, at best.

It has been that the plan would shave just 6 per cent from US carbon emissions by 2030. Climate science and international equity by then. We’re nowhere near that pace.

Still, this plan is not nothing. In its coverage, The New York Times includes this hopeful gem: “But experts say that if the rules are combined with similar action from the world’s other major economies, as well as additional action by the next American president, emissions could level off enough to prevent the worst effects of climate change.”

That’s a lot of hedging on which to base a climate legacy.

In fact, when compared with the climate plans of his would-be successors on the left – Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley – Obama’s in terms of ambition.

Kicking the can forward

Clinton, who has frequently with the president on climate, announced a preview of her own climate plan last week. It’s fractionally more ambitious than Obama’s, but it essentially another few years.

And as Slateâ€ČŮ , there’s no guarantee the plan will endure in its current form after the president leaves office. Obama’s plan faces a phalanx of attacks , and legal challenges – which may take several years – to the Supreme Court.

Obama has any actions by a hostile Congress to weaken it, as long as he remains in office. It has been noted that the next president , so the ultimate fate of Obama’s climate legacy will be in the hands of others.

Doing all we can

In , Obama’s lead environmental advocate, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Gina McCarthy, said that if the rule moves forward, “We’ll know we’re doing all we can, together, to take action against climate change.”

That’s simply not true. We can, and should, do much more.

Last week, former NASA climate scientist James Hansen, fresh off a , had harsh words for the slow, incremental progress that’s formed essentially the entirety of American’s climate ambition to date. “We have two political parties, neither one of which is willing to face reality,” Hansen . “Conservatives pretend it’s all a hoax, and liberals propose solutions that are non-solutions.”

“It’s just plain silly,” said Hansen, speaking specifically of Clinton’s planned renewable energy push. “No, you cannot solve the problem without a fundamental change, and that means you have to make the price of fossil fuels honest.”

In the end, our climate won’t care about how we fix this problem. But it’s clear that . If Obama truly wants to go all-in on climate change, he should meet Republicans where they are – as painful as that might be – and negotiate a way to pass a carbon tax. (I’m going to get a flood of email saying how naïve I am for saying that, but it’s true.)

Don’t get me wrong; the Clean Power Plan, if fully enacted as it is, would definitely help reduce our carbon emissions. But to imply that today’s nudge toward cleaner electricity will bring about a bold new era in American climate leadership is disingenuous. Growing economic headwinds in the fossil fuel sector – particularly in and – may bring about much sooner than Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

If Obama really wants to make a lasting impact on global warming, he can work or in Beijing, to work toward implementing a meaningful, economy-wide carbon tax as quickly as possible. Just because such a breakthrough feels impossible doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary.

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El Niño is here, and this year’s version . Which is why investors might be wondering, given the forecast: how can I make some quick cash?

One of the clearest predictable outcomes of El Niño is a , especially in the tropics where most agriculture is still rain fed and El Niño’s weather-morphing power is strongest. That tends to make for less than ideal growing conditions for the major agricultural commodities there, including rice, cocoa, sugar, palm oil and coffee, leading to a . If one chooses to act on this information, farmers’ losses can be investors’ gains.

El Niño’s weather extremes tend to happen in a roughly predictable pattern, which is exactly the kind of heads-up someone playing the market might be looking for.

Last week, Jodie Gunzberg, a commodities expert at S&P Dow Jones Indices, did of how well commodities investments perform in the 12 months following the onset of El Niño conditions. Double-checking her numbers, I found that of the commodities indexes she listed – which include energy, metals, livestock and agriculture – only agriculture significantly outperforms the broader S&P 500 stock market index following an El Niño.

During the year immediately following the past nine El Niño events, the S&P 500 gained 16.5 per cent on average, while an investment in the S&P agricultural commodity index gained an average of 24.4 per cent – a relative windfall.

Odds on investment

Looking a bit deeper, though, there doesn’t appear to be much of a link between the strength of individual El Niño events and increased return on investment: the three strongest of the past nine El Niño episodes – 1983, 1998 and 2010 – resulted in the year with the best agricultural index performance (2010) as well as the only two years with a negative return (1983 and 1998). So consider these correlations with caution. But the odds are that investing in agricultural commodities right now could fatten some bank accounts.

Here’s why. In India, Brazil and Indonesia – some of the world’s – El Niño usually means drought. The typical thanks to generally good growing conditions in the US usually isn’t enough to offset losses in other parts of the world, so a broad index of food prices tends to spike during El Niño years. Hence some investors might buy up agricultural commodities early in the El Niño cycle.

In India, things are starting to look especially bad. The country’s national weather service for this year’s critical monsoon rainfall on Tuesday – the last El Niño, in 2009-10, resulted in one of the worst monsoon failures on record. Because of its importance to India’s economy, I have previously called the monsoon the .

India has hundreds of millions of farmers, most of whom don’t have access to irrigation – and hundreds of millions more who are dependent on stable food prices for their livelihood. Fearing a spike in inflation due to a possible El Niño-induced drought, India’s central bank lowered interest rates again on Tuesday. The country’s minister for earth sciences, , gave some advice intended to quell fears of a weak economy: “Let’s pray to God that the revised forecast does not come true.”

The last 12 months have seen the number of suicides among Indian . A on the tragic trend by BBC News cites the rash of extreme weather as a leading cause. For some people, that same weather will make them a killing.

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After months and months of , El Niño has officially arrived, and it’s set to boost global warming to new record levels.

Climate scientists at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported the switch to official El Niño status in their on Thursday, and outlined their decision process in .

Here’s what you need to know:

What is El Niño, anyway?
El Niño is one of the Earth’s most powerful climate signals, with the ability to shift weather patterns worldwide. It typically happens only two or three times a decade, and its most important feature is its predictability. Once in place, El Niños normally linger for months, giving affected regions time to prepare for impacts.

Technically, for an official El Niño episode, NOAA requires five consecutive three-month periods of abnormal warming of the so-called in the mid-tropical Pacific, about halfway between Indonesia and Peru. It usually takes a self-reinforcing link-up between the ocean and the atmosphere to achieve this, and it finally appears that the atmosphere is playing its part.

Is there anything special about this El Niño?
El Niño transfers huge amounts of heat from the oceans to the atmosphere, and there are hints that this El Niño, combined with the already very warm global oceans, could bring about a new phase in global warming. An associated slow-moving indicator of Pacific Ocean temperatures, called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), in December and January. A persistently strong PDO is associated with cold winters in the eastern US and drought in California – we’ve had both in abundance this year.

Should the PDO stay strong, it will essentially join forces with El Niño and increase the odds that 2015 will rank as the warmest year on record globally. Last autumn, I wrote that a PDO signal like we’re currently seeing could kick off over the next five to 10 years.

What does El Niño mean for me?
The 2015 El Niño could bring a , although NOAA cautions that it’s still pretty weak at this point so not much will immediately change.

In the US, typical springtime impacts of El Niño point toward wetter-than-normal conditions in California, the south-east and the east coast. El Niño years are also associated with heavy snowfall in the north-east, which we’ve already.

“This El Niño is likely too late and too weak to provide much relief for drought-stricken California,” NOAA’s Mike Halpert, one of the agency’s official El Niño forecasters, said . Florida, on the other hand, has the strongest signal for short-term impacts – the next few months will likely be very rainy in the Sunshine State.

Why now?
In a , the International Research Institute for Climate and Society’s Tony Barnston, who helped make the decision official, explained that the slow build-up of warm water in the Pacific over the past several months has made it “a very unusual time to give an advisory for an El Niño”. El Niños usually start in mid-summer, not early spring. This year’s sluggish onset may be because this year’s El Niño isn’t happening in the typical way.

Close followers of the thermodynamics of the tropical Pacific (you know who you are) will note that borderline El Niño conditions have been around unofficially . Finally, in February, the trade winds began to weaken across a vast stretch of the Pacific, causing an accumulation of subsurface heating.

Forecasters now believe that the ocean and atmosphere have joined forces in such a way that further warming and shifts in global weather patterns are likely – and that was the key to declaring an official start to El Niño on Thursday.

Steve Zebiak, a Columbia University climate scientist who helped issue the first successful prediction of El Niño in 1985, says he’s never seen anything like the run-up to the current El Niño.

“There definitely are some questions here,” Zebiak told me in a phone interview. For a while, Zebiak says, the run-up to this El Niño was looking like that first successfully predicted event. In the last few months, though, things have changed. “Now we’re in a situation where I can’t think of a good analogue for this entire past 12 months over many decades,” Zebiak said. He thinks climate change may be shifting where El Niño forms – now closer to the central Pacific rather than near South America. The impacts of this shift aren’t yet fully understood, but this year will provide a great chance for further study.

What’s next?
Typical El Niños last only for six or eight months, but we could be in for a long one this time, spanning parts of two years or more. By later this year, if forecasts hold, global temperatures should soar to new records, according to Zebiak. A consensus of dynamic climate models now shows a until late summer, although the reliability of the forecast models – which change throughout the year – is typically at its lowest right about now.

Still, Zebiak says that if this El Niño advances across the Pacific as currently predicted, 2015 would likely be the warmest year ever measured globally.

This article was first published by . Eric Holthaus is a meteorologist who writes about weather and climate for Slate.