2014 officially confirmed as the hottest year in history

The Japan Meteorological Association (JMA) has become the latest organization to declare 2014 the hottest year in world history.

JMA, along with the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the British Meteorological Office, are four key organizations that monitor global temperatures, and have confirmed that 2014 was the hottest year ever recorded.

All four agencies conducted separate analyses and assessments, but all came to the same conclusion.

Last year's average temperature was 0.27 degrees Celsius warmer than the average from 1981 to 2010 and 0.63 degrees Celsius warmer than the 20th-century average, according to the JMA.

So far, 2014 is the hottest year in the past 120 years, since world experts began regularly monitoring and recording changes in Earth's climate.

The new assessments also reveal that there has been no slowdown in global warming over the past decade, despite previous claims to the contrary by some researchers. Some believe the slowdown was due to the extreme El Niño weather event of 1998, the second warmest year on record.

Chart of annual average global temperature changes from 1981 to 2010. Photo: JMA

As seen in the chart above, the years after 1998 were cooler, leading to the suggestion that climate change is slowing down.

However, the data shows that, despite being cooler than 1998, the top 10 warmest years on record have all been in the past 16 years. That suggests there is no slowdown.

Before 1998, no year came close to matching the 10 warmest years on record.

"The heat of 2014 was also notable for another reason: the absence of El Niño. Although Pacific Ocean temperatures were high in 2014, atmospheric conditions did not allow for El Niño to form," the report in the journal Nature said.

Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University (USA), also expressed surprise that the record heat was recorded in a year without El Niño. According to him, this is a sign that the Earth is warming very quickly.

Experts generally agree that toxic CO2 emissions from human activities are causing global climate change to reach alarming levels.

According to Daily Mail