Not trying to deny anything but with the length of records and a random distribution you’d still expect “hottest year” to happen pretty often. (Somebody please do the statistics) With a very slightly warming planet it would indeed happen quite often. In other words… setting records means something, but less than one would expect by default. The more valid statistic is something like n of the last 30 years have been t…
They headlined it for emotional impact and clicks. People read "on record" and think it's the hottest the earth has been ever. When it's really 'the hottest' it's been the past few decades. Also, depending on where and how you measure, it will naturally be 'hotter' because the world is getting more urbanized. And cities are artificially hotter. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/city-hotter-co... Are they…
One so famous that it was studied in depth by a prominent US physics professor [1] and (then) climate skeptic using some Koch funding.
The results of the 2013 Berkeley Earth land temperature data analysis on urban heat islands answers your concerns:
When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.
Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that. [1]
The Berkeley Earth group concluded that the warming trend is real, that over the past 50 years (between the decades of the 1950s and 2000s) the land surface warmed by 0.91±0.05 °C, and their results mirror those obtained from earlier studies carried out by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Hadley Centre, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Surface Temperature Analysis, and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia.
The study also found that the urban heat island effect and poor station quality did not bias the results obtained from these earlier studies. [2]