The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have announce that the year 2014 was the warmest on record (link).

This is in keeping with an analysis already published by the Japan Meteorological Agency, as I mentioned in an earlier post (link).

The ten hottest years on record go back only to the late 1990s. In contrast, Earth hasn’t had a record-setting cold year in more than a century.

Here’s a video from NASA summarizing their results:

Astronomer Phil Plait as a post about this on his Bad Astronomy blog (link). He makes the same point I did in a post January 8 (link), namely that there was no El Niño in 2014 to explain anomalous warming. (In contrast, an unusually strong El Niño was a contributing factor in 1998, the hottest year of the 20th century.)

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