Hot, hotter and hottest......

It's a paradox, of sorts, that on the eve of Trump being sworn in as US President - and he, and many of his just appointed crony Cabinet members being climate-change deniers - that a respected body has released data evidencing that 2016 was the hottest year on record - each of the preceding years 2104 and 2015 having held the same record.

"For the third year in a row, the world experienced its warmest year on the books, global scientists have determined.

The new assessments come from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the UK's Met Office, as well as the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which relies in part on data from those agencies. The findings also back up the declaration made earlier this month by the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service.

"2016 is remarkably the third record year in a row in this series," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). "We don't expect record years every year, but the ongoing long-term warming trend is clear."

NOAA's calculations put the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces at 1.69°F (0.94°C) above the 20th century average, while NASA puts the globally-averaged temperatures for the year at 1.78°F (0.99°C) warmer than the mid-20th century average."

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Reading the Chilcot Inquiry Report more closely

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Mahler's Prodigal Son

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