Remember 1998?

You might recall 1998 was once the hottest year on record.  

This is literally what it was like in 1998.  I was there. 
Now EVERYTHING is on fire, all the time.

It held this distinction for several years.  Climate change deniers would point to it (starting in 1999) and say that, yeah, maybe there had been some warming but it had clearly stopped and now the world was cooling because, otherwise, why weren't the years after 1998 hotter?

They managed to keep this nonsense up until about 2005, which was either just marginally hotter or in a dead heat (pun intentional) with 1998.  then, they started it again with 2005 as the reference point.  Though the game became a bit repetitive and dull as every three or four years after than there was a new record.

Yeah, I used it in yesterday's post as well.  Fucking sue me.

With the (unsurprising) news just in that 2023 is the hottest year on record, it is worth taking a moment to reflect that every single one of the years in the Top 10 hottest years is one of the last ten years.  

I imagine it has been like this for a while, but I haven't been paying too much attention.  But every year from 2014 onwards is in the current Top Ten:

Ponder that for a moment.  The last ten years, every last one of them, have been hotter than every other year on the instrumental record.

2014 is, handily, and Number 10 and 2023, helpfully, at number 1 (with a very hot bullet); in between those two chronologically neat bookends, they are a bit jumbled up.  But the point is, every single one of the last ten years is there.  

Even the relatively chilly 2014 was hotter than every other year in that record.