Last week NOAA’s National Climate Data Center reported that 2014 was the warmest year ever recorded on earth.  Yes, there were undoubtedly warmer years before humans were around and perhaps some warm years before we bothered to write it down but for this century and in our lifetimes, it was hot.

Even after the coldest winter the east-central U.S. can remember, the average U.S. temperature was 0.5 degrees above normal.  (Ask Westerners how hot they were!)  Here’s a month-to-month video that shows that even the East was hot in December.

Climate scientists agree(*) that the warming is caused by humans and there will be sobering results.  We’ve caused it.  We record it.  We report on it.  But will the news change anything?

On a political and media level in the U.S. this news has generated interest and talk but no real action.  On the natural level — among the air, water, birds, plants, and animals that I care about — it is big news and they’re doing something about it.  The air is hotter, the ice is melting, the sea is rising, and the plants, animals and birds are moving north or uphill.

Humans are doing something too, even here in the U.S. where our society has not taken up the cause.

Humans are coping with droughts and building bigger dikes and seawalls.  We’re trying to prevent deaths from frequent heavy downpours.  We’re planting warm-season or drought-resistant flowers and crops.  We’re rewriting insurance policies to exclude disasters that are certain to happen. In some cases we’re already abandoning land that’s altered by flood or drought.

By the end of the century our world will look very different.  Right now the news is “hot.”

Read more here.

(map and video from NOAA’s National Climate Data Center)

(*) That number is “97% of scientists agree.”  Discussion of that number can be found here.  I am not going to discuss the number. Plenty of others have already done so.