2014 The Hottest Year in Over a Century, Scientists

You've just lived through the hottest year in history, and that's what data compiled by US scientists reported on Friday. Scientists warning of emissions contradict the anti-global warming researchers, according to a study published by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Hence, 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have occurred since the turn of the century.

Most of Alaska, the US and Europe were plunged in extreme heat. Most of the oceans were warm, except near Antarctica, the scientists said. It fuelled Pacific storms, according to nytimes.com.

Thus 2014 is hotter than 2010 as the hottest in a global temperature record going back to 1880. So far, the 10 warmest years on record have been since 1997, which gives the planetary warming that scientists say is due to human emissions and exposes humans to long-term risks for civilization and to the natural world.

In eastern United States there were below-average temperatures in 2014, while the western land areas had hotter climates. The global temperatures touched 1.24F (0.69C) higher than the 20th-century average. All this is due to the release of greenhouse gases, scientists speculate.

NASA and NOAA compile and sustain two of the three global datasets of global temperatures. The UK's Met Office maintains the third. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) uses the data from all three and gave the basic provisional figures in December, 2014.

Strangely, 2014 record did not feature El Niño, a large-scale weather pattern in which "the ocean dumps an enormous amount of heat into the atmosphere".

This contradicts the claims by climate-change disbelievers in global warming depending on a particular starting year of 1998. That was when an unusually powerful El Niño produced the hottest year of the 20th century.

Due to continuous heating of the atmosphere and the ocean surfaces, 1998 is getting overtaken after every four or five years as the hottest, with 2014 being the first time it has happened in a year without an El Niño pattern. Gavin A. Schmidt, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, said that next time El Niño strikes, it will blow away all the temperature records.

 "Obviously, a single year, even if it is a record, cannot tell us much about climate trends," said Stefan Rahmstorf, head of earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. "However, the fact that the warmest years on record are 2014, 2010 and 2005 clearly indicates that global warming has not 'stopped in 1998,' as some like to falsely claim."

John R. Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who has expressed his skepticism on global warming, said in an interview that 2014 had been hotter than other record-warming years by just a few hundredths of a degree, "well within the error margin of global temperature measurements".

 "Since the end of the 20th century, the temperature hasn't done much," Dr. Christy said. "It's on this kind of warmish plateau."

But Don Wuebbles, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois who has worked on a number of IPCC reports continues to be firm. "You have a continuous upward trend over the last century and that is telling us something. We have a clear signal that our climate changing, and when you look at the evidence it's because of human activities." "The evidence is so strong I don't know why we are arguing any more," Wuebbles said. "It's just crazy."

Another Japanese agency had issued some information in early January that showed 2014 as the hottest year.

"Why do we keep getting so many record-warm years?" Dr. Schmidt asked in an interview. "It's because the planet is warming. The basic issue is the long-term trend, and it is not going away."

February 1985 was the last time global temperatures dipped below the 20th-century average for one month. Hence, if you are below 30 years, you have never lived through a below-average month.