Big (but not surprising) news: 2014 was the hottest year on record, according to NASA and NOAA
Climate Progress gives a useful summary of today’s big news, which is that 2014 has just been declared the hottest year on record by NASA and NOAA. A post on Climate Nexus also gives deep and important context about the new temperature record.
I hope this development finally puts to rest the incorrect notion that there’s been a pause (Professor Michael Mann calls it a “faux pause”) in global warming. That result is made clear in the graph below, which shows decadal average temperatures since 1880.
The 1980s were the hottest decade on record. Then came the 1990s, which became the hottest, and then the 2000s were the hottest. Now we’re on track for the 2010s to be the hottest decade on record. If the averages keep going up, the temperature has to be increasing over time. It’s just math.
The reason why some observers argued that global warming was slowing down is because of cherry picking of data. The year 1998 was an exceptionally hot year, because it was a record El Nino year, but those arguing for a pause deliberately chose that year as the basis for their argument.
The website Skeptical Science shows the climate escalator, contrasting the way cherry pickers view the data and the way realists view the data. Those graphs are embodied in the GIF below.
The critical thing about 2014 is that we don’t yet have an El Nino (although one may be declared in 2015). When you separate the El Nino, la Nina, and neutral years, the warming trend becomes crystal clear (Graph courtesy of Skeptical Science).
It’s also important to understand that the climate varies over time, and that even a decade of data isn’t enough to determine a true trend. We now have more than 4 decades of data (starting in the 1970s) that is consistent with a rapidly warming earth, driven by emissions of greenhouse gas emissions and other human induced changes. It’s therefore time for contrarians to give up the idea that climate hasn’t warmed since 1998. Global warming, driven by human activities, continues unabated.
Now we just need to start abating it.
