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 The White House said the studies, by the U.S. space agency NASA
and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),
showed climate change was happening now and that action was needed
to cut rising world greenhouse gas emissions.
The 10 warmest years since records began in the 19th century have
all been since 1997, the data showed. Last year was the warmest,
ahead of 2010, undermining claims by some skeptics that global
warming has stopped in recent years.
Record temperatures in 2014 were spread around the globe, including
most of Europe stretching into northern Africa, the western United
States, far eastern Russia into western Alaska, parts of interior
South America, parts of eastern and western coastal Australia and
elsewhere, NASA and NOAA said.
"While the ranking of individual years can be affected by chaotic
weather patterns, the long-term trends are attributable to drivers
of climate change that right now are dominated by human emissions of
greenhouse gases," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard
Institute of Space Studies in New York.
 “The data shows quite clearly that it's the greenhouse gas trends
that are responsible for the majority of the trends," he told
reporters. Emissions were still rising “so we may anticipate further
record highs in the years to come.”
U.N. studies show there already are more extremes of heat and
rainfall and project ever more disruptions to food and water
supplies. Sea levels are rising, threatening millions of people
living near coasts, as ice melts from Greenland to Antarctica.
PARIS MEETING IN DECEMBER
Next December, about 200 governments will meet in Paris to try to
reach a deal to limit global warming, shifting to renewable
energies. China and the United States, the top emitters of
greenhouse gases, say they are cooperating more to achieve a U.N.
accord.
The new data "is another reminder that climate change is not a
problem for the future - it's happening here and now and we can't
wait to take action," a White House official said in a statement.
Opponents of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would transport
Canadian crude oil across the United States said the new data made
it all the more pressing to prevent the construction of the
pipeline.
But U.S. Senator James Inhofe, a Republican who is the Senate's
leading climate change skeptic, said the temperature difference
between 2014 and 2010 was so insignificant as to prove there was no
need for more stringent regulations by the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency.
 "Human activity is clearly not the driving cause for global warming,
and is not leading our planet to the brink of devastation that many
alarmists want us to believe,” he said.
The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says it
is at least 95 percent probable that human activities, rather than
natural variations in the climate caused by factors such as
sunspots, are to blame for rising temperatures.
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Still, a Paris deal will be hard to achieve since curbs on fossil
fuel use are unpopular in many nations. Low oil prices may also
discourage a shift to cleaner wind and solar power.
"The political challenges of organizing countries to respond,
particularly through the UN process, remain very high,” Michael
Levi, a fellow on energy and environment at the Council on Foreign
Relations in New York, told Reuters.
Rowan Sutton, director of climate research at Britain's National
Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading, said a
single year did not mean much because it might be a freak hot year.
"But the fact that now 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have
occurred since the turn of the century shows just how clear global
warming has become," he said.
Even so, temperatures have not risen as fast as they did in the
1980s or 1990s, taking an unusually warm 1998 as a starting point.
The IPCC has described it as a hiatus in warming.
NO EL NINO FACTOR
Since 1880, Earth’s average surface temperature has warmed by about
1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius), NASA said. The NASA and
NOAA analyses showed that the world's oceans all warmed last year,
offsetting somewhat more moderate temperatures over land.
The average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was
1.24 degrees F (0.69 degree C) above the 20th century average, NOAA
said.
The scientists noted that the record was set in a year that did not
have the weather pattern known as El Niño, which can heat up the
atmosphere and has been a factor in many past record-setting years,
including 1998.
The United Nations says it is already clear that promises for
emissions curbs at the Paris summit will be too weak to get on track
for a U.N. goal of limiting global warming to 3.6 degrees F (2
degrees C) above pre-industrial times.
(Additional reporting by Timothy Gardner, Roberta Rampton, Caren
Bohan, Valerie Volcovici and Alistair Bell in Washington; David
Adams in Miami; Nina Chestney and Susanna Twidale in London; Writing
by Will Dunham and Alister Doyle; Editing by Alden Bentley, Howard
Goller and Leslie Adler)
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