Was 2014 the hottest year after all?
World media rushed to report that “2014 was the warmest year on record”, but it seems no one bothered to look at the fine print and the fact scientists can’t be sure the claim is true, writes Samantha Walker.
Was 2014 really the hottest year on record? The headlines across the world’s media last month – including these pieces from the BBC, CNN, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and The Age certainly claimed that it was.
The media chorus last month followed a joint announcement by two US scientific organisations: NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and NOAA’s National Climatic Data Centre. On January 16, they released a categorical statement to the press that “2014 was the warmest year in modern record”.
Yet 10 days later, the UK’s Met Office (its national weather service) stated that while 2014 was indeed very warm, it wasn’t actually the single hottest on record. So the first question is – was 2014 the hottest year or not?
A quick bit of critical analysis explains where the confusion lies.
Director of GISS, Gavin Schmidt, and his colleagues published a paper moderately asserting that 2014 was hotter than the second hottest year – 2010 – by just 0.02°C. That number is five times less than the 0.1°C of uncertainty in their measurements. They stated that 2014, 2010 and 2005 were “in a statistical tie because of several sources of uncertainty, the largest source being incomplete spatial coverage of the data”.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
