Thank you, junky weather site wunderground.com for this headline: 2014: Hottest Year in Recorded Human History. Actually this is a pretty good post with a lot of interesting graphs that you can stare at for a long, long time.

According to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, global surface temperatures in 2014 were 1.24°F (0.69°C) above the 20th century average, highest among all years in the 1880-2014 record, easily breaking the previous records of 2005 and 2010 by 0.07°F (0.04°C). Using independent measurement techniques but mostly the same set of surface stations, NASA also rated 2014 as the warmest year on record, as did the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA).

This article talks briefly about the idea that “The rate of global warming since 2000 has been slower than in the 1980s and 1990s…” If you stare at the graphs long enough, you can understand how both of these things are true. From around 1980 to 2000, air temperatures got a lot hotter. From 2000 to now, they have stayed about the same, which is to say constantly very hot. So it is easy for a given year to edge a tiny bit higher than the year before and be the new hottest year ever.