NASA, NOAA: 2014 Was the Warmest Year In the Modern Record

Titus Andronicus writes: NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration both announced today that 2014 was the warmest year in the instrumental temperature record, surpassing the prior winners, 2010 and 2005. NASA also released a short video. They said, "Since 1880, Earth’s average surface temperature has warmed by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degrees Celsius), a trend that is largely driven by the increase in carbon dioxide and other human emissions into the planet’s atmosphere. The majority of that warming has occurred in the past three decades. ... While 2014 temperatures continue the planet’s long-term warming trend, scientists still expect to see year-to-year fluctuations in average global temperature caused by phenomena such as El Niño or La Niña. These phenomena warm or cool the tropical Pacific and are thought to have played a role in the flattening of the long-term warming trend over the past 15 years. However, 2014’s record warmth occurred during an El Niño-neutral year."

Comments

call me skeptical

[ganjadude]

but doesnt this

The majority of that warming has occurred in the past three decades. ... While 2014 temperatures continue the planet’s long-term warming trend,

contradict the fast that we have not had any rising in the past 20 years according to these same people? They call it the "warming hiatus"

Im not saying that the world is not warming, Im not even saying that we humans dont contribute to it. But god damn do they do a crappy job of conveying the message when there are contradictions like this. I could (probably am) reading it wrong but thats my take on it

Re:call me skeptical

[itzly]

That's because the graph is made from monthly data. There have been a few hotter months before, but 2014 still ranks #1 when you average the whole year.

Re:call me skeptical

[danbob999]

Or just take your news from outside the US. The rest of the developed world mainstream medias all have no shame to admit that anthropogenic global warming is happening. Only in the US there is fox-news style media still denying science *and* with such a large audience.

Someone teach me something here...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Since 1880, EarthÃ(TM)s average surface temperature has warmed by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit"

So we need to be alarmed because in 135 years the temperature has increased 1.4 degrees?

I am clearly missing something here.

Re:Interesting to note...

[Em Adespoton]

It may have been on average warmer, but at least in Minnesota we didn't get the massive heat wave weeks in the middle of the summer we use to get in the past.

Yup, that's due to arctic warming, causing a pressure slump that now pushes more moist air into that region during the summer months. Interestingly, it has also resulted in dryer weather on the west coast of North America, and colder weather down the east coast.

Solar, solar, solar. Also, solar.

[fyngyrz]

The earth has been much warmer in the past, and the most notable consequence of those conditions was rampant plant growth. At most, bands of climate that support particular crops will move northward. We are capable of surviving just fine in a very wide range of climate. Slowly increasing warmth of a few degrees is not a serious threat in and of itself.

Sea level: The seas have been much higher, and the consequences of a sea level rise of such tiny amounts as are predicted over such a long period are going to be irrelevant in the big picture. Human society is already extremely mobile over such time periods, and we are almost trivially capable of being even more so. Such moves can potentially benefit us in the sense that we can start over, smarter, for those of our older coastal cities that are so low that a few centimeters sea rise will result in their inundation. Better public transport, better street layout, better zoning, better utility transport and balance, more parks, opportunity to be more efficient in many ways (for example, monorails instead of trains; pumped canals instead of or in addition to streets; raised domiciles that allow 100% utilization of the ground underneath for vegetation... all kinds of opportunities arise when you don't have a gnarly old city infrastructure in the way.)

Long term continuation of CO2 increase: Unlikely. We're already transitioning to solar and so forth. There's no sane reason that wouldn't continue (and we should be pushing government hard to get it done sooner rather than later -- perhaps moving the ~40 billion dollars/year utterly wasted on the drug war (that's just the US costs -- leaves out tax gains and ignores world costs and gains) to solar panel and control electronics and energy storage production might be one way to do so. There is every reason to reduce emissions, even without the potential threat of emissions-related climate change.

The issue that seems to carry the most actual weight in the immediate sense is the possibility of the chemical changes that some scientists have predicted for the oceans. If the oceans undergo major changes in chemistry, the consequences are likely to be both sudden and very serious (as in, we may be royally fucked no matter what we try to do.) All that is, is a yet stronger argument for an even faster transition to stored solar.

The sensible path is to reduce emissions ASAP and as much as possible, while transitioning to stored solar power. In the case of the USA, this also reduces our country's vulnerability to the middle east's whims, something that continuously comes back to bite us on just about every level there is.

Re:Solar, solar, solar. Also, solar.

[drinkypoo]

The earth has been much warmer in the past, and the most notable consequence of those conditions was rampant plant growth.

The most notable consequence of the last temperature change of this rapidity was a dieoff of what percentage of life forms inhabiting the region now known as North America? I'm not sure. Another comment claimed half the mammal species, though. We might find that inconvenient.

Sea level: The seas have been much higher, and the consequences of a sea level rise of such tiny amounts as are predicted over such a long period are going to be irrelevant in the big picture

It might seem that way if you ignore the fact that small changes in sea level can mean very serious changes for storm surges.

Long term continuation of CO2 increase: Unlikely. We're already transitioning to solar and so forth.

Not in any serious percentage, and we continue to produce CO2-producing power plants as fast as we can, as a species.

There is every reason to reduce emissions, even without the potential threat of emissions-related climate change

Not for a psychopath. Our particular political system is apparently designed to put them in office and keep them there.

Re:Trends versus Data Points

[Layzej]

Surface temperature reconstructions of the past 1500 years suggest that recent warming is unprecedented in that time. Here we provide a broader perspective by reconstructing regional and global temperature anomalies for the past 11,300 years from 73 globally distributed records. Early Holocene (10,000 to 5000 years ago) warmth is followed by ~0.7C cooling through the middle to late Holocene ( 5000 years ago), culminating in the coolest temperatures of the Holocene during the Little Ice Age, about 200 years ago. This cooling is largely associated with ~2C change in the North Atlantic. Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change model projections for 2100 exceed the full distribution of Holocene temperature under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios. - http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...

Do you really buy your own BS?

[TiggertheMad]

Just one question for the deniers....When the mean temperature is up ten degrees globally and humanity is tanking it because of massive environmental change and crop failure, you won't be upset when we lynch you for being the liars and shills who prevented proactive fixes from being implemented, will you?

Re:Do you really buy your own BS?

[turkeyfish]

Just out of curiosity, if its not getting hotter how do you explain why of 10 of the hottest years on record have occurred in the past 15 years?

Its basically the same question as why if its not getting hotter, how do you account for the fact that virtually every single glacier on the planet is melting away faster than ever previously recorded?

The odds that it is not getting are by any credible estimate one may care to take, incredibly small, so small that no one needs any longer to take such assertions seriously.

However, the AWG deniers are free to answer the above two questions. The fact that 1) they have not done so and 2) the fact that they can not do so pretty much demonstrates its getting hotter to anyone who is able to think clearly. In fact, it is now getting hotter at a rate of about 36 times the rate that it got hotter during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, the fastest climate induced heating spike in Earth's planetary history.

The inconvenient truth is that the reason it is getting hotter is the accumulation of carbon dioxide generated predominantly by humans burning fossil fuels. This is particularly inconvenient since most of the carbon dioxide enters the oceans and is causing an extraordinary lowering of the pH of seawater. In as little as 200-300 years most of what we now think of as the marine food chain will be gone, because many of those creatures at the bottom of the food chain will be unable to produce their calcium carbonate skeletons. A rather big deal for humans, who derive about 50% of their protein from the oceans. Its already beginning to happen over big swaths of the NW Pacific Ocean.

Re:wee little issue

[Rockoon]

Let us know when we can download the raw unprocessed data to feed into their pet algorithm. Yeah... you are about to link to some place where you THINK the raw data is... but you are wrong... thats processed data ("adjusted") and they keep altering the old, already processed, data.... funny that.

(I am a witness to it - quite simple really, download their data... wait 4 weeks and download it again... do a difference.. note how old data keeps changing)

Bad science, at least the claim...

[LynnwoodRooster]

The year was the warmest on record by 0.01 deg C. Yet the error bars are 5 times that amount for this year (and 20 times that amount just 30 years ago). Statistically - it's among the warmest dozen or so, but you can't claim beyond that because of the measurement error.