2014 Was Hottest Year on Record, Surpassing 2010

Edit: here you can play with years and rate-per-decade trends: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/global

So, the record, while incomplete, is pretty good.

The lack of market drive to thorium - not just in the tree-hugging US, but in less sensitive places like China - is a dead giveaway that either a: it's not nearly as easy as it's made out to be, b: it's not economical relative to other reactor designs, or c: it's not nearly as safe as claimed. I think c can be ruled out, based on common sense and the fact that China doesn't care so much about safety. That leads to either a, or b, or some combination of the two.

At any rate, the hard reality of the invisible hand tells me that thorium isn't so awesome after all, or we'd see thorium reactors in commercial use by now.

How do you remediate a corrupt system?

I never doubted it.

How much sunk cost do we have out there in fossil-fuel-based infrastructure and technology? How much would it cost in energy to replace all that sunk cost? Where's the investment capital going to come from for all that in a shrinking economy?

Many people thought we'd hit "peak oil" in the 2000s. They were wrong. That's the nature of bubbles -- they always go higher than anyone anticipates. The amount of oil we produce will continue to rise with demand on a kind of stair-step function until it doesn't. The people who predict the bubble popping always sound like fools until they don't. Then they sound like prophets, but then it's too late.

When will this point be? Next decade? Four decades from now? Nobody really knows. You're comfortable with that? Do you have kids?

Also keep in mind that we might be able to keep stretching it out very far if we adopt things like coal to liquids, gas to liquids, etc. But as we do that, the environmental damage will increase exponentially as will the CO2 emissions per unit energy generated. If you think we have a CO2 problem now...

I would think our recent experience with economic bubbles would provide some sense of how these things unfold. Bubbles make everyone look like a fool in turn. First they make the skeptics and "bears" look like fools, and then they pop and make the believers look like fools.

Fossil fuel extraction -- the self-catalyzed exponential utilization of a finite resource -- behaves quite a lot like an economic bubble and will ultimately end the same way because physics. The question is whether we will have moved on enough by then that the blow is cushioned. That's an existential question IMHO. If the answer is "no," there won't be much of a future.

http://www.electricpedals.com/human-power-station/

It is quite foolish and selfish that generations living from about 1900 to 2100 will burn up 3 billion years of stored sunlight in the form of fossil fuels.

It will be at the least drastically painful when the fossil fuels run out if we don't take action.

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ushcn/ushcn.html

What would you do if your livelihood depended on towing the company line?

I've looked at the data local to me for the stations that are rural and have had no development. The raw data shows no warming. The adjusted data suddenly shows warming.

My view is that it's just odd to emphasize the error-proned data over the more reliable data for dramatic effect. That's not science. And when governments and media just pick it up and run with it, it weirds me out.

Maintaining scientific rigor is difficult in the best of times. Unfortunately, people give in to vain impulses to try to short cut the process and "prove" their position is correct even though the actual scientific process is slow.

One hot year is just one year, as one cold year would be. It's proof of very little. Certainly the validity, or not, of incredibly complex climate models does not rest particularly strongly on one year out of many.

Short circuiting the climate debate when a year is warm is no better than when a year is cold, and merely legitimizes the practice.

You're total the person I trust to make logical arguments.

Now don't get me wrong. I believe in making the world a better place for my kids. But to get caught up in all the hype that comes from the media (including the article I linked to) is laughable.

This argument is about politics and $$$ (both sides of the argument).

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/

"The year 2014 was the warmest year across global land and ocean surfaces since records began in 1880. The annually-averaged temperature was 0.69°C (1.24°F) above the 20th century average of 13.9°C (57.0°F), easily breaking the previous records of 2005 and 2010 by 0.04°C (0.07°F). This also marks the 38th consecutive year (since 1977) that the yearly global temperature was above average. Including 2014, 9 of the 10 warmest years in the 135-year period of record have occurred in the 21st century. 1998 currently ranks as the fourth warmest year on record.

The 2014 global average ocean temperature was also record high, at 0.57°C (1.03°F) above the 20th century average of 16.1°C (60.9°F), breaking the previous records of 1998 and 2003 by 0.05°C (0.09°F). Notably, ENSO-neutral conditions were present during all of 2014.

The 2014 global average land surface temperature was 1.00°C (1.80°F) above the 20th century average of 8.5°C (47.3°F), the fourth highest annual value on record."

What I find irritating is the rather poor science behind much of this (statistical modelling being presented as scientific proof for example), and government agendas and business interests are all clouding the picture.

The UK government for example have raised a huge amount of tax on the back of these fears.

I never did any such thing. I just said that (1) their graph data was good but (2) their concern about extreme values was bad. Both (1) and (2) are plainly obvious and need no "counter-evidence".

I don't trust the NYT, but I didn't say that they were "lying".

> making empty claims

I made no claims except the obvious one that the NYT was emphasizing extreme values which, clearly for such data analysis, is wrong.

The argument about global warming is totally clear, "settled": No one knows what the climate will be in 10, 50, or 100 years for any scenarios having to do with humans.

Proof: Look at the results of the climate computer models; they are in fairly good agreement and predicted that today the temperatures would be much higher. They were wildly wrong. QED

Why were the models so wrong? For the technical part, assuming that the work was done honestly (and I don't really believe that), Freeman Dyson has a remark, I don't recall precisely, that maybe the problem was the models didn't do well modeling the effects of the biological responses or some such. So, maybe they did well enough with the Navier-Stokes equations, Planck black body radiation, sun spots, etc. but blew it on green leafy vegetables. But, at least from Freeman Dyson, we don't know.

Why would the NYT emphasize extreme values? That's not a scientific or technical question and, instead, is about their motivations. My guess about their motivations, YMMV and no technical references needed, is that they want to pass out drama to get attention for their ads. Believe it or not. But a long time ago people saw that truth and the newspapers were not good bedfellows:

Evidence: An Andy Hardy movie from the 1930s where, clearly, the audience accepted that newspapers passed out nonsense. More? Sure, Citizen Kane, which a lot of people can find believable.

For the sources of the NYT, I didn't see any mentioned. Sorry to say, at this point, given Obama's political positions, I can no longer take data from NASA or NOAA very seriously, but that is not a biggie in this case. I didn't claim that the extreme values were wrong, just that, when we do have average data, for the data analysis in question here, extreme values add nothing but confusion. Here I am on very solid ground: Clearly the temperature is a stochastic process; commonly we get new extreme values right along even if nothing is really changing. There are some quite precise results in the cases of coin flipping, Brownian motion, and martingales. What would be surprising would be that we didn't get new extreme values -- if we never got more extreme values, then we would have some bounds for the process that we would have a tough time believing.

"Anomaly" is still the wrong word. Actually, with a good meaning of anomaly, we should just f'get about them; that is, they are anomalies, and in that case the whole NYT article is moot.

Yes, I mentioned that it is common in this global warming mud wrestling to say anomaly -- it's still the wrong word. Critical reading comprehension 101 would have us conclude, correctly in my view, that here anomaly is intended to mean not really from nature but from humans and their evil CO2, and that is value-heavy. Or, the suggestion is that there is a reason for the anomaly, and their claim of the reason is human CO2. Send your money now to your favorite green political pressure group.

100% pure, total propaganda with nothing objective at all, certainly not peer-review.

After reading their Guru Ramaswamy's radiative forcing it was totally clear that they were totally worthless for anything meaningful.

They are a political organization trying to raise money by carbon taxes on the developed countries to transfer wealth to the third world.

Somehow I just lost 37 points today, 5 points from my post here and another 4 points on a post on how to help a 7 year old girl who went to the wrong comic book store. Apparently with HN arithmetic, 5 + 4 = 39.

For the girl, I suggested she go to a music store that focused on classical music. I also suggested the movies, stores of American Girl. The comic book shop was right next to porn. Gee, my suggestion was not liked.

> the vitriol that you fire at the NYT's opinions

The NYT has long been and still is a NYC wild-eyed liberal, bleeding-heart, emotional hysteria organization, heavily for wealthy English majors and wannabees.

I deeply, profoundly, bitterly hate and despise the NYT, but I fired no "vitriol" but (1) said good things about their graph but (2) criticized them for using extreme values to get people excited.

Again, once again, over again, one more time, rock solid, for such a situation extreme values may be better than no data at all but, given good average data, one more time, this time just for you, once again, maybe you will actually read it this time, you can read, right, the extreme value data is useless. Or, some solid advice -- f'get about extreme value data. Stuff it for the hottest, the coldest, the least ice, the fastest winds, etc.

Leave the importance of extreme values to, say, Olympic records. For GDP, that's an average. For the corn crop, we want an average. For crude oil production, we want an average, say, monthly. For global temperature to consider global warming, we want an average. An average, not extreme values.

One biggie reason for the importance of the average is that it essentially is, has to be, what's important, e.g., the area under the curve, the total energy involved, etc. The average per day times the number of days is the total, e.g., as for your income and paying your taxes.

But the NYT will use anything they can get away with to get their readers all hysterical, up on their hind legs, believing in their trilogy of transgression by evil humans against the pure, pristine, precious, 100% all-natural mother earth. So, it's a 1000 year old morality play they learned in English literature class. Then there is the retribution part -- destroy the coral reefs, the oceans, the whales, the forests, NYC via rising sea levels, etc. Then there is the redemption -- suffering, sacrifice, self-denial. So, walk or ride bicycles, use electric cars (NYC liberals hate anything having to do with cars -- in Texas, Wyoming, and Montana they like cars). In this way the NYT creates a story and an audience for their story and then just keeps running such stories to feed their audience. They also make NYC liberals feel good. If you don't see this transparent manipulation, too bad -- it's what they've been doing for decades. You've been manipulated by some people who want your eyeballs, your money, your time, etc.

What's going on with the temperature of the planet? No one knows. The record is totally clear -- the computer models have been wildly off. The models are far too much in agreement and far too far away from reality -- what the models predicted for now is much, much higher temperatures than we are seeing.

Just why the models are wrong, no one knows. Maybe they got the Navier-Stokes equations right, or the sunspot data right, or the black body radiation right, or the convection right, or some such, but messed up on the biological effects, the oceans, or whatever.

Maybe we are still slowly pulling out of The Little Ice Age. As we warm from The Little Ice age, we will also have to warm the oceans, and they are mostly 3 miles down and 7 miles or so over much of the Pacific; it might take a long time to warm the oceans from the cooling they got in The Little Ice Age. There is the NAS report that shows that from year 900 to year 1000, just before The Little Ice Age started, the temperature was increasing very rapidly, about the same as the past 100 years, and that increase had nothing to do with human generation of CO2.

But, given their record, and their nonsense with extreme values, there's no way to trust the NYT. So, we need to get their data from other sources. They have to name the sources or we have to regard their writing as just drama. NASA? Sadly they may have been bent by Obama who wants global warming as one of his issues.

While I hate the NYT, all I wrote about them was that they wanted people to get excited about extreme values, and there I was rock solidly correct. If you can't see this, then that's your problem.