Meanwhile Outside...(Despite Pittsburgh's Snow, It's STILL Getting Hotter)

I'm sure you've seen this (or something like it) by now:

Scientists reported Wednesday that 2015 was the hottest year in the historical record by far, breaking a mark set only the year before — a burst of heat that has continued into the new year and is roiling weather patterns all over the world.

And then a paragraph later:

Scientists started predicting a global temperature record months ago, in part because an El Niño weather pattern, one of the largest in a century, is releasing an immense amount of heat from the Pacific Ocean into the atmosphere. But the bulk of the record-setting heat, they say, is a consequence of the long-term planetary warming caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.

Here's the NOAA report, if you want to see for yourself.  From the Summary:

The globally averaged temperature over land and ocean surfaces for 2015 was the highest among all years since record keeping began in 1880. During the final month, the December combined global land and ocean average surface temperature was the highest on record for any month in the 136-year record.

But wait (I can hear the climate deniers interject) what about that 18 year pause that Senator Cruz talks about?  Take a look:

It will take a few more years to know for certain, but the back-to-back records of 2014 and 2015 may have put the world back onto a trajectory of rapid global warming, after a period of relatively slow warming dating to the last powerful El Niño, in 1998.

Politicians attempting to claim that greenhouse gases are not a problem seized on that slow period to argue that “global warming stopped in 1998,” with these claims and similar statements reappearing recently on the Republican presidential campaign trail.

Statistical analysis suggested all along that the claims were false, and that the slowdown was, at most, a minor blip in an inexorable trend, perhaps caused by a temporary increase in the absorption of heat by the Pacific Ocean.

“Is there any evidence for a pause in the long-term global warming rate?” said Gavin A. Schmidt, head of NASA’s climate-science unit, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in Manhattan. “The answer is no. That was true before last year, but it’s much more obvious now.”

The AP has the story (as is to be expected, of course) but take a look at where that AP story's landed - the Tribune-Review:

Last year wasn't just the Earth's hottest year on record — it left a century of high temperature marks in the dust.

The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and NASA announced Wednesday that 2015 was by far the hottest year in 136 years of record-keeping. For the most part, scientists at the agencies and elsewhere blamed man-made global warming, with a boost from El Niño.

The interesting part's down bottom.  The last paragraph of the AP story printed in the right wing Tribune-Review:

Non-scientists who reject mainstream climate science often criticize NOAA for adjustments to past temperature records to reconcile the measurement devices with modern techniques, but even without any adjustments, NOAA data shows 2015 as the hottest year on record, [Tom Karl, director of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information] said.

I wonder if the editorial board, in all it's right wingy deep scientific insights, even reads the news section of it's own paper.

We'll see.