In climatological terms, last year was another scorcher, writes Brendan McWilliams.
A funny thing happened earlier this year in southern Brazil: they had a hurricane. Although you might not think so, this was a remarkable event.
Hurricanes, as we know, are two a penny in the north Atlantic, but that ocean south of the equator has been to generations of meteorologists rather like Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire - places where, as Prof Higgins perceptively pointed out in My Fair Lady, "hurricanes hardly happen".
Indeed, no hurricane has been spotted in the south Atlantic Ocean since the relevant satellite records began in 1966.
This year's anomalous storm came ashore in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina on March 28th. The Brazilians simply called it "Catarina", and it caused a considerable amount of damage and some loss of life.
Scientists in the coming year will be wondering if all this has anything to do with the fact that, in climatological terms, 2004 was yet another scorcher.
The global mean temperature for the year was more than 0.4C above the 1961-1990 annual average. This makes it the fourth warmest year since instrumental records began around 1860, and leaves it just a tad behind 2003 in this respect.
The prize for the very warmest year goes to 1998, when global temperatures averaged what climatologists think of as a massive 0.5C above the 30-year norm.
Indisputably, therefore, whatever the cause may be, global warming has now come upon us. The last 10 years, 1995 to 2004 inclusive, with the exception of 1996, are among the warmest 10 years on record.
During the 20th century, the global temperature increased by the best part of a degree Celsius, but the rate of change during the last 25 years has been roughly three times that.
Presumably as a consequence, Arctic sea-ice coverage decreased to about 13 per cent below the 1973-2003 average during 2004.
The South Atlantic was not the only place where hurricanes happened this year.
Fifteen named tropical storms developed in the north Atlantic, compared to the average of 10, and eight occurred in August, a record number for that month.
Nine of the named storms developed into full-blown hurricanes, and six of them were classified as "major". Hurricane Charley was the most destructive hurricane to strike the US since Andrew in 1992.
These developments continued the trend, evident since 1995, for higher than average numbers of tropical storms in the Atlantic Basin.
It was an eventful weather year in other parts as well.
Many places around the world were affected by severe and debilitating droughts - southern Africa and Australia early in the year, later sub-Saharan Africa, and then India in the weeks leading up to the arrival of the summer monsoon.
Moderate to severe drought conditions continued in some areas of the western US for the fifth year in a row, and during July and August heatwaves with near-record temperatures affected southern Spain, Portugal, and parts of eastern Europe, with temperatures soaring to more than 40C.
But some places got too much water. Mudslides and floods due to heavy rains left tens of thousands of people homeless and resulted in 161 deaths across areas of Brazil during January and early February.
Hurricane Jeanne produced flooding that claimed some 3,000 lives in Haiti, and in India, Nepal and Bangladesh 1,800 deaths were blamed on flooding brought about by heavy monsoon rains.
In October, two typhoons brought record-breaking heavy rainfall to Japan, and in the second half of November three tropical storms brought torrential rain to parts of the Philippines, triggering catastrophic flash floods and landslides reported to have killed 1,100 people.
And then, in December, as we know, a tsunami came ashore.
Meanwhile, here in Ireland, we had a rather uneventful weather year. The trend for warmth continued, mirroring the global picture; a very mild winter was followed by a mild and sunny spring. When the books are finally balanced it is likely that the temperature for the year as a whole will turn out to have been between half a degree and a full degree above the norm.
Neither was there much variation from this nondescript regime throughout the year. We had a few spells of frosty weather in late January, again towards the end of February, and a few days of the "pewit's pinch" in early March, but nothing more severe.
The warmest weather of the year came in mid-June, and again in early August, when maximum temperatures topped 25C in parts of Munster and Leinster.
After a dry spring, we experienced a rather wet summer. Indeed, many parts of the south experienced up to 150 per cent of their normal rainfall, making it, for them, the wettest summer for many years. But, paradoxically, sunshine figures for the summer were in general, also above average; Cork Airport's 16 hours of sunshine on June 15th was the highest amount recorded there since the airport opened more than 40 years ago.
The highlight of the Irish weather year has to be the severe storm of late October, which came as a climax to the very wet period of the previous few weeks. On October 27th and 28th, there was severe flooding in many southern parts of the country, in some places because rivers overflowed their banks, and in others because coastal towns succumbed to the unfortunate coincidence of the heavy rains, high spring tides and very strong on-shore winds.
The trauma of the late October rains was followed by what, by and large, was the mildest and driest Irish November on record. This left, as the only remaining bit of meteorological excitement, the white Christmas enjoyed by many, the first such event for most of us for several decades.
Brendan McWilliams is a former deputy director of Met Éireann