Hottest year on record provided setting for conclusive scientific findings as mushrooming climate movement pressed world leaders to act. It was January, and tennis players at the Australian Open were suffering through the scorcher that would be the year 2014. They threw up and they fainted from the record-setting heat. They put on ice vests. The soles of their sneakers and the bottoms of their water bottles softened as the mercury marked 109 degrees Fahrenheit. They were knocked flat by the longest Melbourne heat wave in a century. The new year seemed to be welcoming the world to the new normal. ?All year long, from the Antipodes to the Aleutians, the changing global climate plagued the planet. If 2014 does not, in the final reckoning, prove to be the hottest year ever recorded, it will come very close. As a landmark scientific review published by several U.S. government agencies declared in May: "Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present."

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