The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released their year-end report on the planet’s average temperatures, and 2015 has proven to the warmest year since record keeping began in 1880 — by a wide margin. The year also left a trail of multiple broken temperature records in it’s wake, for both yearly and monthly records over land, sea, and combined averages.

2015’s global average temperature was a full 1.62ºF (0.90ºC) above the 20th century average, and it beat 2014’s record temperature by 0.29ºF (0.16ºC). This margin is also a record, in-of-itself, being the widest observed margin on record.
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In response to record-breaking warm, wet weather in Britain, professor Myles Allen of the Climate Research Programme at University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, has declared normal weather to be a thing of the past.

Speaking in an interview with BBC’s Radio 4, Allen responded: “You asked ‘is this the new normal’, well as I stressed, normal weather, unchanged over generations, is now a thing of the past. And if we’re building buildings and building infrastructure, we’re going to have to use climate simulations to work out what the weather will be like that that infrastructure will have to tolerate in 50 years’ time.”
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The eastern half of North America is definitely not dreaming of a white Christmas this season: the forecast is calling for record-breaking warm temperatures this week, with some regions to see temperatures 35º Fahrenheit (19ºC) above normal. Temperatures are expected to briefly dip over Christmas itself, but are expected to rise again for the remainder of the year.
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