Via James Hansen and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies climate division, 2016 is now officially the hottest year in the modern record:
Update of the GISS global temperature analysis finds 2016 to be the warmest year in the instrumental record. For the second year in a row the prior record was broken by a substantial margin. 2015 and 2016 annual temperatures were, in part, boosted by the 2015-16 El Niño. Because of the delayed global response to the natural El Niño/La Niña variability,3 it is likely that the 2017 global temperature will fall below that of 2016, as discussed below.
From the linked blurb, last year was about 1.26°C (~2.3°F) warmer than the 1880-1920 base period. More data and tables can be found at the GISTEMP website here. This is the first time since thermometers were invented that we’ve had three consecutive years of record heat. And on the data, as if there were any doubt, NOAA concurs:
With a boost from El Nino, 2016 began with a bang. For eight consecutive months, January to August, the globe experienced record warm heat. With this as a catalyst, the 2016 globally averaged surface temperature ended as the highest since record keeping began in 1880, according to scientists from NOAA's NCEI.