Last year was the Planet Earth's hottest year on record, and may have been the hottest in 115,000 years.  And climate scientists are putting the blame squarely on man-made global warming.

2016 started with an El Nino that contributed to higher temperatures, but that was gone by the end of the year.  Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies said 90 percent of warming in 2016 was due to rising greenhouse gas emissions:  "El Nino was a factor this year, but both 2015 and 2016 would have been records even without it."

The final data for 2016 comes from three key agencies:  the UK Met Office,  and NASA and NOAA in the US.  It shows that the Earth's average temperature has now risen about 1.1 C Degrees above pre-industrial levels, when humans began burning fossil fuels ona  large scale.  It brings the world closer to the 1.5 C Degree cap that was the goal of the climate agreement signed in Paris in December 2015.

"The spate of record-warm years that we have seen in the 21st century can only be explained by human-caused climate change.  The effect of human activity on our climate is no longer subtle," said Professor Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University.  "It's plain as day, as are the impacts - in the form of record floods, droughts, superstorms and wildfires - that it is having on us and our planet."

Unfortunately, this could very well be the last data coming from the United States in a while.  The incoming Trump administration has threatened to strip away funding for "politically correct environmental monitoring"; and the orange clown doesn't believe in climate science, claiming without a shred of evidence that global warming is a hoax invented by the Chinese to stop manufacturing in the US.

"Any politician who denies this evidence from world-class climate scientists will be wilfully turning a blind eye to rising risks that threaten the lives and livelihoods of their citizens," said Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics.  "I hope that president-elect Trump and his team in particular will acknowledge and act on this important scientific information."