The hottest year on which record?

Did you know that 2014 was the hottest year ever recorded in the entire history of the world? Probably you did because it’s been all over the papers. Not only that but President Obama slipped it into his State of the Union address and the president of the World Bank quoted it at Davos and the singer and rap producer Pharrell Williams is so concerned that he plans to stage a series of Live Earth concerts with Al Gore to emphasise the seriousness of the problem.

And these luminaries must know what they’re talking about, right? After all, it’s not just one distinguished scientific institution which has endorsed the ‘2014: hottest year on record’ claim, but a whole clutch of them.

First out of the gates was the Japanese meteorological office, then our own Met Office, then most recently Nasa’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies. These, in turn, were doing no more than agree with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. So many international experts, all in agreement: what kind of ‘scientifically illiterate’ denialist nutcase would you have to be to dispute a consensus as overwhelming as that?

A very thick-skinned one, that’s for sure, as I was saying just the other day to my old friend and fellow scientifically illiterate denialist nutcase Christopher Booker. Given the choice, I’m sure we’d both be more than happy never to write again on a subject for which we take so much flak. Except we don’t have a choice. Not really. When you’re a journalist and a story comes your way which is screaming to be told and which almost everyone else is ignoring, what option do you have but to fulfil your professional obligations to the truth?

So it is with this ‘hottest year on record’ story.