Watch All Of The World's 2015 Weather In One Very Cool Video

A still from a video of satellite imagery showing
the world's weathe in 2015.

Meterologists put together a really cool video taken from geostationary satellites that show how the weather evolved across the globe during 2015.

The video is a compilation of geostationary satellities operated by EUMETSAT, the Japan Meteorological Society and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Mark Higgins, Training Manager at EUMETSAT narrates the video, pointing out highlighs such as the numeous cyclones and typhoons that formed in the eastern Pacific and Indian oceans and the seasonal transitions from large extratropical storms to thunderstorms in the northern hemisphere.

He also points out features like hurricane Joaquin, which then raced across the Atlantic Ocean as a strong non-tropical storm that unleashed floods in Europe.

It's a cool video to watch, if only to enjoy the steady flow of clouds and weather systems as they make their way around the world. It's like watching a well-tuned machine at work.

Even if under the clouds depicted in this "well-tuned machine"there's sometimes a chaos of wind and rain and blizzards and other dangerous weather.

 Here's the video:

I Knew 2015 Was Going To Be The Hottest On Record, But WOW!

2015 was warmer than average in most places on
Earth, except northeastern Canada and the central North
Atlantic Ocean. 

To nobody's surprise, the year 2015 was the world's hottest on record, says NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information.

The surprise, though, is by how wide a margin the record was broken, and how many heat records for Earth have been piling up over the past many months and several years.

Here are some of the highlights in the report, issued today:   

--- The year 2015 was 1.62 degrees warmer than the 20th century average. That beats the old record by 0.29 degrees, the widest margin for any year to break a new mark for heat.

Breaking a record by about a third of a degree doesn't sound like much, but when averaged over the entire globe, it's a lot.

By the way, the old record for hottest year on Earth in modern records was set way back in 2014. Yep, a little over a year ago.

--- 2015 marked the fourth time this century that the Earth broke a record for heat. There are a few climate change deniers that are still clinging to the myth that global warming peaked in 1998, but 1998 has now been relegated to a tie for 6th hottest on record, behind 2015, 2014, 2010, 2013, 2005 in that order.

Also, some people who say global warming doesn't exist say graphs show a leveling off of global warming starting in 1998. But that "pause" really didn't exist, if you look at the recent yearly heat records. And if you add 2014 and 2015 to the graph, you see global temperatures still trending up, up, up, up.

--- Ten months in 2015 were the hottest on record. Five of those months broke the record for heat by the widest margin observed in modern recofds.

--- The latest NOAA report also included the analysis for December, 2015, which - surprise! -- was the hottest on records in data that dates back to 1880. December broke the previous record for the hottest 12th month by a whopping full 2 degrees.

A monthly global departure of two degrees above normal has never been observed in modern records until now.

By the way, December was also the hottest on record in the United States as a whole, and was the hottest on record where I live in Vermont by a huge margin.

It's interesting that there's a persistent cold patch in the North Atlantic Ocean that has showed up consistently for months or even years now. Many scientists suspect that melting ice from Greenland is affecting ocean currents, leading to that cold spot in the Atlantic.

Which means even a cold statistic is troubling in the age of global warming.

Obviously, 2015 got a boost in temperature from El Nino, which tends to raise global heat, especially when you get a strong one like the current El Nino now under way.

Still, when you break records by margins like this, something other than El Nino is going on, and I can't think of anything other than global warming, despite what the skeptics say.

When El Nino fades, we'll likely have some years that are not the hottest on record. I'd say 2016 might or might not be as hot as 2015, and my inkling is 2017 will be cooler than 2015, as El Nino will certainly have faded by then. But then again, I've been surprised before

Regardless, unless somebody can show convincing evidence to the contrary, I would also bet there will be years not that far beyond 2017 that will be even hotter than the sweaty 2015 was.

Will Earth's Hottest Month And Year Cause A Familiar Political Arc?

Trend in global tempeatures 1880 through 2014. Click on the map
to make it bigger and easier to see. You'll notice 1998 was WAY
warmer than previous years, but subsequent years were
in the general ballpark of 1998, not much cooler. I'm
predicting similar trends to 1998 as 2015 becomes by far
the hottest global year on record. 

This week we learned that October, 2015 was the hottest month for the Earth has a whole since they started keeping good records in the late 1880s. By hottest month I mean it temperatures were furthest above the long-term average.

This breaks the record for hottest month set way back in.......September 2015, says NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. 

Yep, the month before.  October was the sixth consecutive months with record high global temperatures.

This news adds to the evidence that the year 2015 will by far be the hottest on record.

A super strong El Nino, which tends to release a lot of extra heat into the atmosphere, combined with the overall effects of climate change, caused these record high global temperatures.

I have a feeling this state of affairs might end up causing history to repeat itself. The last time we had a super strong El Nino was in 1997-98. That caused 1998, up until that time, to smash the record for the hottest year.

On charts, 1998 stuck up like a sore thumb, way above the average temperature of previous years. But then a funny thing happened. It cooled off a bit after 1998, but not much, and it wasn't nearly as cool in the early 200s as it was in the early 1990s. , .

The world continued to warm, and we eventually had more global hot records, arguably in 2005, in 2010 for sure and definitely in 2014.

But with 1998 standing up so high, at least temporarily above other years, climate change deniers looked at the charts and claimed global warming "peaked" in 1998 and a cooling trend ensued.

That was nonsense, of course. The global temperature always relaxes back downward a bit after an El Nino fades and that was true in 1998. But the world continued to heat up. You gotta look at the overall trend over a long time, and not cherry pick a year, say, 1998, to show a trend.

I bet the same thing will happen in 2015. This year will probably stick up like that proverbial sore thumb in temperature charts. I imagine 2016, or 2017, or 2018, or maybe all of the above, will turn out cooler than 2015.

But the inexorable rise will continue. I guess 2015 is just a preview of the future, just as 1998 was a preview of the the early 2010s.