2014 Is Likely to Be the Earth's Hottest Year Ever. Why It Doesn't Matter.

The United Nations World Meteorological Organization is out today with a report that’s sure to get people on the left and right all riled up: According to the UN, the Earth’s average temperature over land and sea in 2014 will be among the hottest—and likely the hottest—of any year since record-keeping began in 1880.

How hot? 58.23-degrees Fahrenheit, up 0.14 degrees from 2013, the UN says.
Some climate change activists, many of whom are now gathered in Lima, Peru, for annual UN climate talks, will seize on this told-you-so number as proof that global temperatures are rising. Climate change deniers will dismiss it as an outlier that proves nothing.
The truth: They’re both wrong, for opposite reasons.
This chart shows the yearly change in the Earth’s air temperature since 1880. The changes are measured against the planet’s average temperature over the 30 years from 1961-1990, the time period the UN uses as a climate benchmark. The temps zigzag up and down from year to year, seemingly at random, but with an overall upward path. Global warming skeptics are right if they argue simply that the 2014 news doesn’t tell us much that’s meaningful about the planet’s climate health:

But that doesn’t mean the deniers are right to say global warming is nonsense.
Long before the climate debate took hold, scientists measured temperature trends in 30-­year increments, precisely because yearly snapshots are inconclusive. Three decades is long enough to even out the highs and lows so that long­-term patterns can be discerned.
As the chart below shows, in any 30-year period for the last half-century, the Earth’s estimated average temperature rose against the 1961-1990 benchmark. Beginning in the 1960s, these three-decade temperature trend lines begin to shoot up dramatically and remain on an alarming upward trajectory. (Thanks to Gavin Schmidt at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies for help crunching the raw WMO provisional temperature data.)

This is why arguments about global warming are so exhausting. The politics of climate change, which are messy and confusing, have nothing to do with the facts of climate change, which are fairly uncomplicated and straightforward.
The takeaway from today's news isn't that the Earth got hotter in 2014. It's that the Earth is getting hotter, period.