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Last year was the hottest in earth’s recorded history, scientists reported on Friday, underscoring scientific warnings about the risks of runaway emissions and undermining claims by climate-change contrarians that global warming had somehow stopped.

Extreme heat blanketed Alaska and much of the western United States last year. Several European countries set temperature records. And the ocean surface was unusually warm virtually everywhere except around Antarctica, the scientists said, providing the energy that fueled damaging Pacific storms.

In the annals of climatology, 2014 now surpasses 2010 as the warmest year in a global temperature record that stretches back to 1880. The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1997, a reflection of the relentless planetary warming that scientists say is a consequence of human emissions and poses profound long-term risks to civilization and to the natural world.

Of the large inhabited land areas, only the eastern half of the United States recorded below-average temperatures in 2014, a sort of mirror image of the unusual heat in the West. Some experts think the stuck-in-place weather pattern that produced those extremes in the United States is itself an indirect consequence of the release of greenhouse gases, though that is not proven.

Several scientists said the most remarkable thing about the 2014 record was that it occurred in a year that did not feature El Niño, a large-scale weather pattern in which the ocean dumps an enormous amount of heat into the atmosphere.

Longstanding claims by climate-change skeptics that global warming has stopped, seized on by politicians in Washington to justify inaction on emissions, depend on a particular starting year: 1998, when an unusually powerful El Niño produced the hottest year of the 20th century.

With the continued heating of the atmosphere and the surface of the ocean, 1998 is now being surpassed every four or five years, with 2014 being the first time that has happened in a year featuring no real El Niño pattern. Gavin A. Schmidt, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, said the next time a strong El Niño occurs, it is likely to blow away all temperature records.

“Obviously, a single year, even if it is a record, cannot tell us much about climate trends,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, head of earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “However, the fact that the warmest years on record are 2014, 2010 and 2005 clearly indicates that global warming has not ‘stopped in 1998,’ as some like to falsely claim.”

Such claims are unlikely to go away, though. John R. Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who is known for his skepticism about the seriousness of global warming, pointed out in an interview that 2014 had surpassed the other record-warm years by only a few hundredths of a degree, well within the error margin of global temperature measurements.

“Since the end of the 20th century, the temperature hasn’t done much,” Dr. Christy said. “It’s on this kind of warmish plateau.”

NASA and the other American agency that maintains long-term temperature records, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, issued separate data compilations on Friday that confirmed the 2014 record. A Japanese agency had released preliminary information in early January showing 2014 as the warmest year.

The last scientific group that curates the world’s temperature record, in Britain, is scheduled to report in the coming weeks.

“Why do we keep getting so many record-warm years?” Dr. Schmidt asked in an interview. “It’s because the planet is warming. The basic issue is the long-term trend, and it is not going away.”

February 1985 was the last time global temperatures fell below the 20th-century average for a given month, meaning that no one younger than 30 has ever lived through a below-average month.

The contiguous United States set its temperature record in 2012. But, mainly because of the unusual chill in the East last year, 2014 was only the 34th warmest year on record for the lower 48 states.

That cold was brought into the interior of the country by a loop in a current called the jet stream that allowed Arctic air to spill southward. But an offsetting kink allowed unusually warm tropical air to settle over the West, large parts of Alaska and much of the Arctic.

A few recent scientific papers say that such long-lasting kinks in the jet stream have become more likely because global warming is rapidly melting the sea ice in the Arctic, disturbing longstanding weather patterns. But many leading scientists are not convinced on that point.

Whatever the underlying cause, last year’s extreme warmth in the West meant that Alaska, Arizona, California and Nevada all set temperature records. Some parts of California had basically no winter last year, with temperatures sometimes running 10 or 15 degrees above normal for the season.

Those conditions exacerbated the severe drought in California, which has been alleviated only slightly by recent rains. Some small towns have run out of water, the sort of impact that scientists fear will become commonplace as global warming proceeds in the coming decades.

2014 Was Hottest Year on Record, Surpassing 2010,
NYT,
JAN 16, 2015
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/17/
science/earth/
2014-was-hottest-year-on-record-surpassing-2010.html

Not Even Close:

2012 Was Hottest Ever in U.S.

January 8, 2013

The New York Times

By JUSTIN GILLIS

The numbers are in: 2012, the year of a surreal March heat wave, a severe drought in the Corn Belt and a huge storm that caused broad devastation in the Middle Atlantic States, turns out to have been the hottest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States.

How hot was it? The temperature differences between years are usually measured in fractions of a degree, but last year’s 55.3 degree average demolished the previous record, set in 1998, by a full degree Fahrenheit.

If that does not sound sufficiently impressive, consider that 34,008 daily high records were set at weather stations across the country, compared with only 6,664 record lows, according to a count maintained by the Weather Channel meteorologist Guy Walton, using federal temperature records.

That ratio, which was roughly in balance as recently as the 1970s, has been out of whack for decades as the country has warmed, but never by as much as it was last year.

“The heat was remarkable,” said Jake Crouch, a scientist with the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., which released the official climate compilation on Tuesday. “It was prolonged. That we beat the record by one degree is quite a big deal.”

Scientists said that natural variability almost certainly played a role in last year’s extreme heat and drought. But many of them expressed doubt that such a striking new record would have been set without the backdrop of global warming caused by the human release of greenhouse gases. And they warned that 2012 was probably a foretaste of things to come, as continuing warming makes heat extremes more likely.

Even so, the last year’s record for the United States is not expected to translate into a global temperature record when figures are released in the coming weeks. The year featured a La Niña weather pattern, which tends to cool the global climate over all, and scientists expect it to be the world’s eighth- or ninth-warmest year on record.

Assuming that prediction holds up, it will mean that the 10 warmest years on record all fell within the past 15 years, a measure of how much the planet has warmed. Nobody who is under 28 has lived through a month of global temperatures that fell below the 20th-century average, because the last such month was February 1985.

Last year’s weather in the United States began with an unusually warm winter, with relatively little snow across much of the country, followed by a March that was so hot that trees burst into bloom and swimming pools opened early. The soil dried out in the March heat, helping to set the stage for a drought that peaked during the warmest July on record.

The drought engulfed 61 percent of the nation, killed corn and soybean crops and sent prices spiraling. It was comparable to a severe drought in the 1950s, Mr. Crouch said, but not quite as severe as the legendary Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s, which was exacerbated by poor farming practices that allowed topsoil to blow away.

Extensive records covering the lower 48 states go back to 1895; Alaska and Hawaii have shorter records and are generally not included in long-term climate comparisons for that reason.

Mr. Crouch pointed out that until last year, the coldest year in the historical record for the lower 48 states, 1917, was separated from the warmest year, 1998, by only 4.2 degrees Fahrenheit. That is why the 2012 record, and its one degree increase over 1998, strikes climatologists as so unusual.

“We’re taking quite a large step above what the period of record has shown for the contiguous United States,” Mr. Crouch said.

In addition to being the nation’s warmest year, 2012 turned out to be the second-worst on a measure called the Climate Extremes Index, surpassed only by 1998.

Experts are still counting, but so far 11 disasters in 2012 have exceeded a threshold of $1 billion in damages, including several tornado outbreaks; Hurricane Isaac, which hit the Gulf Coast in August, and, late in the year, Hurricane Sandy, which caused damage likely to exceed $60 billion in nearly half the states, primarily in the mid-Atlantic region.

Among those big disasters was one bearing a label many people had never heard before: the derecho, a line of severe, fast-moving thunderstorms that struck central and eastern parts of the country starting on June 29, killing more than 20 people, toppling trees and knocking out power for millions of households.

For people who escaped both the derecho and Hurricane Sandy relatively unscathed, the year may be remembered most for the sheer breadth and oppressiveness of the summer heat wave. By the calculations of the climatic data center, a third of the nation’s population experienced 10 or more days of summer temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Among the cities that set temperature records in 2012 were Nashville; Athens, Ga.; and Cairo, Ill., all of which hit 109 degrees on June 29; Greenville, S.C., which hit 107 degrees on July 1; and Lamar, Colo., which hit 112 degrees on June 27.

With the end of the growing season, coverage of the drought has waned, but the drought itself has not. Mr. Crouch pointed out that at the beginning of January, 61 percent of the country was still in moderate to severe drought conditions. “I foresee that it’s going to be a big story moving forward in 2013,” he said.

Not Even Close: 2012 Was Hottest Ever in U.S.,
NYT, 8.1.2013,
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/
science/earth/2012-was-hottest-year-ever-in-us.html

It Adds Up:

This Was New York’s

Hottest Summer

August 31, 2010
The New York Times
By PATRICK McGEEHAN

With one final, fitting blast of 96-degree heat on Tuesday, the summer of 2010 went down in the National Weather Service’s record books as the hottest ever in New York City.

Hotter than the previous high of 77.3 degrees set in 1966, when more than 1,100 deaths were attributed to heat that repeatedly exceeded 100 degrees. Hotter than 2006, when a heat wave set off a blackout in northern Queens that left more than 100,000 residents without power for days.

But in this record-breaking season — defined by the Weather Service as June through August — there was no cataclysm, no singular event that was likely to define a three-month period when the temperature averaged 77.8 degrees. Instead, the summer of 2010 might be more properly measured in more subtle ways.

For Sal Medina, a newsstand operator from the Bronx, it could be measured by the number of frozen water bottles that he slipped into his pants this week to stay cool (three).

For John Natuzzi, it could be all the ice cubes used during the first day of the United States Open tennis tournament on Monday (80,000 pounds).

For lifeguards, it could be the number of total visitors to the city’s beaches (17.2 million).

For executives at Consolidated Edison, it would surely be the number of 90-degree days the utility struggled through without any widespread disruptions of its power network (34).

Tally it all up and the sum of the last three months is a rarely interrupted stretch of hot days that forced New Yorkers to keep cool in ways both traditional and creative.

Mr. Medina, 56, who lives in Pelham Bay, could barely stand to be inside his metal-jacketed newsstand at Clinton and Delancey Streets on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. To cool off, he devised a system using frozen pint-sized bottles of Poland Spring water.

He would tuck three inside the waistband of his pants. A fourth he would sling in a plastic bag whose handles he would knot just under his chin, holding the icy cylinder against the back of his neck.

Even with that gear, Mr. Medina said he had quit early a few days this summer, heading home at 3 p.m. on the hottest days, instead of the usual 6. The heat, he said, “affects your whole nervous system, makes you grouchy; it makes you so you can’t stand your customers.”

At Natuzzi Brothers Ice Company in Queens, the phones ring nonstop once the temperature hits 90, Mr. Natuzzi said. This summer, he said, his company has been supplying dry ice to ice-cream stores to keep their products frozen, a request he said he rarely got last summer.

The shortage of orders during the cool early months of last summer led to significant losses, Mr. Natuzzi said, but this summer has been a different story. The company, whose warehouse holds 40 tons of ice, sold out its supply during the heat wave that started on the July 4 weekend. It has been running its delivery trucks up to 15 hours a day since then.

“It’s been quite a ride this summer,” Mr. Natuzzi said.

Exhausted as he is, it is not quite over. His company supplies ice to the food-service operations at the United States Open, which runs for two weeks. On the first day, the Open used about 20,000 pounds more than usual, he said. “I’ll look back and say that this is one summer I’ll never forget,” Mr. Natuzzi said.

At Con Edison, the summer of 2010 will be memorable for what did and did not happen. In the past three months, the utility’s customers drew more power off its grid than during any previous three-month period, according to data compiled by the company. But through successive heat waves, the electric distribution system held up, with only occasional localized disruptions.

“For two days we suffered,” said Theo Trilivas, 65, a retired plumber who lost power in his home in Astoria, Queens, in July. “No power. No cooking. No A.C. No lights. Nothing. We had to throw out everything in the freezer.”

The growing demand for power from residential customers has been one of the bigger surprises to Con Ed officials this summer. Of the company’s 36 distribution networks, 14 — all in residential areas — exceeded the forecast for peak demand, said John F. Miksad, a senior vice president who oversees the company’s electric operations. Reflecting the weak state of the economy, power usage by commercial customers declined this summer, he said.

The increased use of air-conditioning has been one constant of life in the metropolitan region. According to Con Ed’s estimates, 6.6 million air-conditioners are in use in its service area, and that number is rising by at least 170,000 a year.

Sam Sharma and his wife tried placing buckets of ice cubes on window sills and in front of fans in their apartment on the second floor of a house in Woodside, Queens. But eventually they broke down and did what so many other New Yorkers have done: they bought an air-conditioner.

“We have it in the living room and only run it when it is extreme heat, and then only for a few hours,” said Mr. Sharma, an immigrant from Nepal who works as a parking lot attendant. “Maybe we used it 10 days this whole summer. It’s expensive.”

In search of relief, some people actually sought out the city. On Monday, Sharon Fredman, 38, a Web consultant from Tenafly, N.J., had run out of suburban options to entertain her daughter, Margot, 8, and keep her cool at the same time. So she drove in for the day to let Margot splash around in a sprinkler in Tompkins Square Park. “When it’s 90 degrees,” Ms. Fredman said, “it’s equally hot everywhere.”

When New Yorkers sought to escape the heat indoors, they flocked to the beaches, particularly Coney Island. According to the city’s parks department, total attendance at Coney Island’s beach slightly exceeded 12.8 million people, more than triple the total from 2009.

“There were tremendous increases at all the beaches,” said Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner. “The beaches were our natural air-conditioners.”

Many of those beachgoers were repeat visitors, like Stephen Fybish, who said he went to Coney Island or neighboring Brighton Beach to swim in the ocean 11 times this summer. He said that he found the sand to be crowded some days but that he always had ample room to swim.

A weather historian who has kept detailed records on temperatures in the city for many years, Mr. Fybish was already looking ahead to September and calculating what sort of weather it would take to extend the hottest-ever distinction. By his reckoning, the average temperature for the month has to be higher than 71 degrees for New York to have its hottest June-through-September period on record.

C. J. Hughes and Rebecca White

contributed reporting.

It Adds Up: This Was New York’s Hottest Summer,
NYT, 31.8.2010,
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/
nyregion/01summer.html

Storm Long Past,

Darkness and Heat

Still Cling to Baton Rouge

September 9, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

BATON ROUGE, La. — The fearsome heat of a South Louisiana summer, unmediated by air-conditioning, reduces the strong to a primal struggle and sends the weak to the hospital.

Thousands here are enduring it this way seven days after Hurricane Gustav. Nearly 40 percent of the city’s electrical power remains out, and the principal utility, Entergy, says it will be the last week of September before everyone’s electricity here in the state capital is restored.

Whole neighborhoods are sweating it out, discovering things about the natural setting, themselves and their neighbors they did not know and in some cases did not particularly want to know. Front doors are open, generators are humming, downed tree limbs are piled high, and the people are dripping.

Power blackouts have been widespread in South Louisiana in the last week. More than 200,000 of Entergy’s customers in Louisiana were still without power Monday, down from nearly 829,000 immediately after the storm.

“It’s sort of paralyzed the economy of the state,” said Foster Campbell, a member of the Louisiana Public Service Commission.

Politicians are fuming, literally and figuratively. Several are vowing investigations and promising a closer look at warding off the failures that are, in Louisiana, as common as the violent summer storm.

This one, however, is a marathon. And it is particularly hard to swallow now that New Orleans, the resented city downriver, has had its power restored, and just downright unpleasant when the thermometer reads 95 and the humidity is right there with it.

“I’m not coping; I’m just existing,” said Marilyn O’Brien, standing outside her son’s house in Capital Heights, a pleasant district of 1920s houses under towering trees, many of them now fractured by the storm. Ms. O’Brien looked haggard. The yard was covered in downed power lines and chunks of tree trunk her son had diligently sawed. He has no power, and neither does she.

“I don’t know how the Iraqis have done it,” she said. “Your energy’s zapped, and you’re wet. My clothes feel like another layer of skin. And I’ve not slept in a week.”

Down the street, the power failure sent 73-year-old Verien Flaherty to the hospital with heat exhaustion and dehydration by the second day. Her little house, she said stoically, had become “quite hot and smelly.” By Monday, though, her son had procured a generator, and she was sitting in the darkened living room.

Nearby were fleets of Entergy trucks, not working fast enough for most of the people here. Entergy says the hurricane roared right up the path of its major transmission lines, knocking out all 14 of them between here and New Orleans. Some 8,000 poles went down too, all carrying above-ground wires. Giant steel towers holding the lines were pushed to the ground like a child’s Erector set.

Alex Schott, a spokesman for Entergy, said the company was “restoring power at record speeds.” The company’s lines suffered “a lot of damage,” Mr. Schott said, and Baton Rouge was “where the brunt of it occurred.”

Even longtime critics of Entergy, a profit-making regional energy company that is a monopoly or near-monopoly in many places and whose stock has steadily risen over the last eight years, say burying the power lines may not be practical in a place like South Louisiana, where water is rarely far from the surface.

But there could be other ways of protecting the power system from the strong storms that regularly batter this coastal state. Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, said Monday that she was working on legislation to give the government a role in strengthening the transmission lines here, “so that when disaster strikes, our communities will not be faced with needless and endless power outages.”

Mr. Schott said Entergy might be interested in such strategies, “as long as costs are recoverable” — in all likelihood, paid by the customers.

An aide to Ms. Landrieu spoke of encasing the lines in reinforced pipe, as is done in Europe.

Mr. Campbell, the public service commissioner, said it was “totally unacceptable for people to be out two, three weeks without electricity.” He made note of what has become a particular irritant in light of the failures, the sky-high power bills that are a feature of life here.

“There’s a great irony here: we have some of the poorest people in the country, and some of the highest utility rates in the Southeastern U.S.” said Mr. Campbell, who added that he was “not interested in giving Entergy any money for this storm.”

In Capital Heights, the accent was on stoicism. “Our house is sweaty hot,” said Kelly Nelson, a hospital physical therapist. “You go to sleep at 9 o’clock, you wake up at 11 at night, hoping it’s time to go to work.”

Across the street, Keith Morris, an artist, was wet but smiling. “It’s O.K.,” he said. “I’m 58 years old. I’ve lived in Louisiana and in Siberia, and it’s a hell of a lot easier here than in Siberia.”

For others, the unwonted exposure to that basic element of Louisiana life made them rethink a commitment that often demands so much. “I’ve lost my attachment to something that hurts me,” Ms. O’Brien said.

“It has beaten me up, so I feel like divorcing it,” she said. “I would leave Louisiana.”

Jeremy Alford contributed reporting.

Storm Long Past, Darkness and Heat Still Cling to Baton Rouge,
NYT, 9.9.2008,
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/
us/09power.html

Scorching Heat

Blankets East Coast

June 10, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN HOLUSHA

Scorching heat and stifling humidity gripped much of the east coast on Monday, with the National Weather Service issuing heat advisories as temperatures were expected to exceed 100 degrees in many areas.

The heat wave was expected to last into Tuesday and prompted officials in Philadelphia and Connecticut to send students in public and parochial schools home early both days and cancel evening programs, The Associated Press reported. The heat caused power failures that interrupted some subway service in New York.

New York’s Office of Emergency Management said it would open cooling centers for people who do not have air conditioning, and other cities were making similar arrangements. Officials urged relatives and neighbors to check in on elderly, housebound people, who are most in danger during hot spells.

The hot weather extended from New England down through the Middle Atlantic states into the Carolinas.

Weather officials said heat waves are not just uncomfortable, they are dangerous. “Heat is the number one weather-related killer,” the weather service said. “On average, more than 1,500 people in the U.S. die each year from excessive heat.”

That is more than the deaths attributed to tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and lightening combined, the agency said.

In New York City, service on the F and G lines in Brooklyn was disrupted during Monday’s rush hour because Con Ed lines that power the subway systems signals failed. Officials of New York City Transit said generators were being sent to the affected areas so service could be resumed.

Paul Fleuranges, a spokesman for the transit system, said the problem was relatively minor, but critical. “We have third-rail power. That hasn’t been affected. So we can move trains, but without signals we can’t operate safely, which is why we have to bring in generators.”

Sunday’s high temperature in Central Park was 93 degrees, just shy of the 95-degree record for the date.