2014 Was NOT the Warmest Year on Record

The science journal Nature trumpets “2014 was the hottest year on record” and cites the Japan Meteorological Agency, the World Meteorological Organization, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

However, NOAA and several other principal terrestrial temperature datasets – which are subject to measurement, coverage, and bias uncertainties and have been repeatedly revised in a questionable fashion over the past year to show ever greater rates of warming – have not yet reported their December 2014 values.

The two satellite datasets – RSS and UAH – have both reported. Figure 1 shows the mean of the monthly anomalies on the two datasets since the beginning of the record in January 1979.

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