Hottest January Ever

Hottest January ever recorded.  After the hottest December, hottest November, etc, etc.  The chart shows the average for the 12 months to January for each year.  You can go here to play around with different moving averages.   But you see the same picture whichever smoothing you choose: a sustained rise in global temperatures since the mid-70s.

The last big el niño year was 1998, and this is a favourite year for climate change denialists to pick as the starting point for their charts, because until 2014, you could make a (feeble) case that global warming had ceased for the last decade.  You can see the spike in the chart in 1998, but look how insignificant it is in the context of the history from the 1970s onwards.  Now the denialists are saying that the current temperature spike is due to el niño, and so there's nothing to worry about.  And so it is.  But the el niños are just cycles round a rising trend.  And the point is that this cycle has taken us to new highs--much higher than the last el niño.  But of course, when we get la niña, in other words a cooling cycle, over the next couple of years, the Right will claim that the world is cooling, and that coal is good for us.

Cretins.