"There's never been a hotter year than this year." This statement is misleading at best, and a flat out lie at worst. The Earth is 4.54 billion years old. NOAA has been gathering data for 130 years. So they have data from .00000028% of the Earths weather cycle. What if anything can be logically and rationally be concluded from such a miniscule sample of data?

I'm fairly certain people with an IQ of more than 3 (obviously not including yourself), will understand, based on the headline and actually reading the article, that this is referring to recorded temperatures. Idiot.

You're an asshat

Wow, thats totally insane. I think its only gonna get worse!

Lou

www.web-privacy.es.tc

I second the motion to declare Friday's poster an asshat.

To anonymous:

You can absolutely establish short term trends from the data. The trend is extremely unusual increases in both land and sea temperatures during a solar minimum.

Keeping your head in the sand does not protect it from climate change.

So this does prove global warming! >.>

Once again, a tiny sampling is being shoved down our throats as proof positive that my car is going to KILL THE WORLD! OMG!!!!!

Just remember, kids... as soon as NOAA announces that the world is getting cooler, their funding is going to dry up faster than the Moscow countryside. They have a dog in this race: funding. They're not going to kill it.

Oh My God!!! I'm melting!!! It's so hot!!!

[/sarcasm]

Been a pretty timid year in Texas up until about a week and a half ago; since then it's been about normal.

Have a miserable life whomever wrote this piece of trash 'article'. Tree-hugging, pot-smokin', lazy hippy. LOL

Saying it took you 205.263 seconds to compose the original post(Avg wpm for composition is 19) and the average life span being being ~78 years. From that .0005% sample of your life I feel comfortable finding that you are a douche. Of course it is from what we have on record because it is so meaningful to talk about information we have no way of ever collecting.

Yes...it HAS been awesome! What a great summer! Keep up the good work, global warming!

What a whiner! Then this person wishes all of us a miserable summer?! Global warming has been proven fake AND a money-maker for the higher-ups in that scheme. Last I checked we only get 3 months tops of nice weather here in Seattle. So shut-up and move out of this state AND country if you don't like it!

its global warming IF it gets colder where its not normal, and if it gets hotter where its hot.I think its the 500 year cicle of climate flow, and not the 10,000 years cicle where we f*ing freeze and die. hur dur

Remember folks, it's not about Global Warming, it's about Climate Change. There is a big difference.

NASA data is frudulent. They extrapolate (guess) 1200km out into the arctic where there are no sensors. CRU shows different results. Besides, THE YEAR ISN'T OVER YET YOU NUMBNUTS!

The NOAA has been collecting weather data since 1900, this infographic uses data >= 1970. Not sure how accurate this graphic is.

The article makes no claim one way or the other about global warming. Since the title is The Hottest Year Ever Recorded, I think it's safe to say the author was talking about recorded temperatures. The global warming denier talking point that our recorded temperatures represent too small a set of data to be meaningful conveniently forget the fact that we have ice core data that is considered to be extremely reliable, and which dates back hundreds of thousands of years. The argument is long since over with, but the deniers want to keep on denying anyway. Personally, I think they're starting to look a little crazy and I'm trying not to make eye contact, if I can help it.

The 5 easy steps to being green, creating local jobs, and adverting the worst effects of climate change and peak oil.

1) Stop SprawL!!!

2) R.R.Recycle!

3) VeganLife!! / ReForest / FoodForest! / VirginForest!!

4) Wind! / GeoThermal Exchange!! / Solar!

5) Electric &OpenSource: Trains!! / Cars / Media!! / Medicine!

www.350.org/about/science

www.usgbc.org/DisplayPage.aspx?CMSPageID=1989

www.storyofstuff.com

www.peta.org/vsk

www.democracynow.org

Global warming is just more of obama's communist, polar bear hugging propoganda to convince us to vote for balcks. tell me this genius's: if theres a global warming happening howcome its so cold in Washington today? Quit trying to make our children marry gays and kill all obamacare doctors!

"I'm fairly certain people with an IQ of more than 3 (obviously not including yourself), will understand, based on the headline and actually reading the article, that this is referring to recorded temperatures. Idiot."

It seems someone doesn't seem to understand how controlled the media is. Temperature records have been in existence since before the 1820's. Even in such a relatively small frame of time such as 190 years, the Earth has seen hotter average temperatures than it is experiencing now. To say that this is the "hottest on record" is only accurate if you are referring to time between now and about 1880, which is the most commonly displayed time at which National weather institutes currently display as there "Oldest" recordings. Institutes such as GISS USED to show records as far back as 1819 BUT quickly removed all recordings before 1880 after several publications in 2004 exploited the data and showed that, if referring to the complete table of records, there is no warming NOR cooling trend greater than .02 degrees Celsius on record in the United States. In order to make a clear decision, you must realize that the "Facts" presented by the media in all forms (yes, even the information I am sharing now, I must be fair) is suspect to bias, forgery, and editing in order "prove" the authors point. I would suggest that you take a look into ALL forms of media referring to Climate Change and make a decision on your OWN. Instead of merely relying on one or two biased forms of news such as the oh so popular Fox news or CNN. All media is skewed. If you want truth, do the research yourself, and interpret your own data.

Of course it's the warmest year ever recorded. We're only half way through it. While, technically half the world is hot and the other half is cooler during each season, let's call it the hottest, when the year is OVER, not 8 months in. Or should we just forget fall, and winter?

Imagine you have a refrigerator with milk in it. This refrigerator has is supposed to keep your milk at a nice 38 deg F.

You open your refrigerator door to look inside, only for a second. What's the temperature after having opened the door? Probably still 38 deg F. Now, open the door again, only for a second. Any change yet? Not likely. Does this prove that opening the door does not affect the temperature of the refrigerator? No.

Repeat 300 times, now the temperature goes up to 39 deg F. No biggie, right? It's just one degree. But what about 40 deg F? After a few repetitions, of this door opening thing, your milk is going to start getting warm.

Warm milk turns sour. Sour milk turns rotten, and rotten milk can kill you.

We're turning our oceans sour by raising the temperature of the planet a few degrees. This event is called ocean acidification. An acidic ocean prevents healthy coral, leading to loss of coral. Loss of coral means no refuge for fish. No refuge for fish means no spawning grounds for fish, means no fish to eat means no more fish.

It's happening, and while you may argue over 1 or 2 degrees, the pH of the ocean is going down (bad), and the coral is clearly going away, and fish sanctuaries are disappearing, and fish counts are going now. This is being measured. It is happening, and one cannot deny the fact that we are destroying the ocean that we get our food from.

puleeze folks, don't feed the trolls.

It's obvious that this data shows some serious shite on the horizon.

Mike said:

"Just remember, kids... as soon as NOAA announces that the world is getting cooler, their funding is going to dry up faster than the Moscow countryside. They have a dog in this race: funding. They're not going to kill it."

Think about it Mike, they are a federal agency that does science. How exactly is it that if the world starts cooling their funding is going to dry up? Please explain that. According to their website:

"NOAA's roots date back to 1807, when the Nation’s first scientific agency, the Survey of the Coast, was established. Since then, NOAA has evolved to meet the needs of a changing country..."

So even though they've been around for a long time, all of a sudden if the earth starts cooling their funding is going to get cut off? They're not called the "Federal Global Warming Agency", right? So why is it that you assume they somehow have a personal investment in global warming?

Use your brain.

In San Diego we're experiencing one of our coolest years ever. Not inferring that this article is wrong, just that I'd love an explanation for why the Pacific is bucking the trend.

Anyone else notice that over the Pacific and in central Russia the temperatures are actually cooler than average? It seems rather biased to make a global statement about temperature when the change isn't actually global.

Also, since the scientific community regards ice core data as sufficiently accurate for temperature recordings, then the author uses a very loose definition for the word "recorded".

Why do people over-exaggerate their announcements when this just hurts their otherwise credible results?

To all who doubt these trends based on local climates (Sorry Cody...picking on you). I'll try to keep this as non-technical as possible:

Our climate is what scientists/engineers refer to as a dynamic & chaotic system. With simple systems (e.g. dropping a rock from a roof, heating a pot of water, etc) things tend to behave as we would expect, because there are few factors and confounds. There may be only 1 or 2 factors to consider, like gravity, heat, electricity, or whatever. All the different factors interact, but they are relatively predictable because there are few of them.

With things like global climate, there are thousands, if not millions of factors all interacting at the same time, the vast majority of which are unknown and unpredictable. This is a dynamic system. It behaves in ways that are not always predictable, even though we know as a whole how they behave. I don't know if this is true, but a possible explanation may be that an overall increase in heat could cause a shifting of jet streams or warm water currents in the ocean, leading to colder weather in some parts of the world when the rest of the planet is heating up.

Now I know what you're thinking now: this means that all climate science is bunk right? If we can't predict a tiny part of the climate (e.g. the weather tomorrow in San diego) how the hell are we supposed to know what will happen 100 years from now everywhere?

It is simply because dynamic systems such as climate are more predictable in the long term than in the short term. As a physician I really don't have a great depth of knowledge of atmospheric science, but I can guarantee we see this phenomenon every day in patients. Allow me to explain:

Let's say I have a patient come in with a fever. I know the types of things that cause fever, how to figure out if they are occurring, and how to treat them. However if I was to pick a random spot in this patient's body, I have no way of knowing what the actual temperature would be. It could be hot, cold, or perfectly normal. It depends on a huge number of factors; how close that area is to the skin, how close it is to infection, the overall metabolism, how well the heart is working, how well the brain is working, and a thousand other considerations. I can't predict local temperature because it is a dynamic system. However, I took his oral temperature and know what pneumonia looks like, so I can be pretty certain that overall, this person is sick and has a fever. On a large scale, the human body, a dynamic system is pretty predictable. I can tell you for certain that you have pneumonia. But I have no idea when the area of lung 2 inches under your left nipple will be completely free of infection.

So back to climate. I have no idea what the temperature will be in San Diego tomorrow because that is not what climatology is about (Notice how Climatology and Meteorology are not the same words). Climatology is about long-term predictable changes, like sea levels rising because overall, the planet is getting hotter.

I wish there was something more I could say to convince the yet unconvinced. Because we are on the verge of catastrophe, my friends. This needs to stop being about politics, petty differences, or at it's worst, pure selfishness. We need to stop arguing about if climate change is real or not and start arguing about how to stop it. Because if it does turn out that every major scientific group studying the climate is wrong, that there really is some super-secret conspiracy to propagate a myth so a few climatologists can maintain their hefty $50,000 salaries, then life will go on, despite how ridiculous it may be. But if we are right, and we do nothing, there may not be much of a planet or country to cherish 100 years from now.

So stop fucking mouth-piecing for the Oil companies and pundits if you really care about preserving your way of life.