2014 was the hottest year on record

[finehoe]

The year 2014 was declared the hottest year in a joint announcement by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, based on separate analyses of weather records dating back to 1880, when Rutherford B. Hayes occupied the White House.

Driven in part by steadily warming oceans, average temperatures edged past the previous records set in 2005 and 2010. The 10 hottest years in modern times have all come since 1997, NASA scientists said.

"This is the latest in a series of warm years, in a series of warm decades," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. While fluctuations are possible in any given year in a system as chaotic as weather, Schmidt said, "the long-term trends are attributable to drivers of climate change that right now are dominated by human emissions of greenhouse gases."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/its-official-2014-was-the-hottest-year/2015/01/16/e207b8ee-9db8-11e4-a7ee-526210d665b4_story.html

[benfranklinbof]

Now if this continues I might be able to get a lychee tree in my yard! This is optimism at its finest

[Ocklawaha]

Got land for sale in the high desert of California! Anyone want to invest in those tropical condos in Antarctica? Wow I'm sweating just thinking about it.

[finehoe]

Several scientists said the most remarkable thing about the 2014 record was that it had occurred in a year that did not feature a strong El Niño, a large-scale weather pattern in which the Pacific Ocean pumps an enormous amount of heat into the atmosphere.

Skeptics of climate change have long argued that global warming stopped around 1998, when an unusually powerful El Niño produced the hottest year of the 20th century. Some politicians in Washington have seized on that claim to justify inaction on emissions.

But the temperature of 1998 is now being surpassed every four or five years, and 2014 was the first time that happened without a significant El Niño. Gavin A. Schmidt, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, said the next strong El Niño would probably rout all temperature records.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/17/science/earth/2014-was-hottest-year-on-record-surpassing-2010.html