2014 melts heat record

JUSTIN GILLIS, TT, New York Times News Service, Jan. 16: Last year was the hottest in earth's recorded history, scientists reported today, underscoring warnings about the risks of runaway emissions and undermining claims by climate-change contrarians that global warming had somehow stopped.

Extreme heat blanketed Alaska and much of western US last year. Several European countries set temperature records.

The ocean surface was unusually warm virtually everywhere except around Antarctica, the scientists said, providing the energy that fuelled damaging Pacific storms.

In the annals of climatology, 2014 now surpasses 2010 as the warmest year in a global temperature record that stretches back to 1880.

The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1997, a reflection of the relentless planetary warming that scientists say is a consequence of human emissions and poses profound long-term risks to civilisation and to the natural world.

Of the large inhabited land areas, only the eastern half of the US recorded below-average temperatures in 2014, a sort of mirror image of the unusual heat in the west.

Some experts think the stuck-in-place weather pattern that produced those extremes in the US is itself an indirect consequence of the release of greenhouse gases, though that is not proven.

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

Longstanding claims by climate-change sceptics that global warming has stopped, seized on by politicians to justify inaction on emissions, depend on a particular starting year: 1998, when an unusually powerful El Niño produced the hottest year of the 20th century.

With the continued heating of the atmosphere and the surface of the ocean, 1998 is now being surpassed every four or five years, with 2014 being the first time that has happened in a year featuring no real El Niño pattern.

Sceptics are unlikely to be deterred, though. John R. Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who is known for his scepticism about the seriousness of global warming, pointed out in an interview that 2014 had surpassed the other record-warm years by only a few hundredths of a degree, well within the error margin of global temperature measurements.