6.02pm BST

One commenter said today that any answer to this question other than "we need to wait and see" would be no better than the work of a "non-science charlatan". Well at the risk of being tarred and feathered, I'm going to make a prediction. This year will be recorded as the hottest since 1880.

Appropriately, the climate scientists I spoke to today avoided making a definitive prediction. But there was definitely a consensus among them that 2014 is shaping to be either very hot or the hottest.

This is the first time we have seen such high early year temperatures with an oncoming El Niño. The years 2010 and 1998 began right in the midst of an El Niño event. This saw elevated temperatures from January to June, then a tailing off as a La Nina established itself. The pattern this year is reversed. We are likely to see some degree of El Niño pushing temperatures up in the later months of this year. However we have already seen one of the hottest first six months on record. All temperatures need to do from here is maintain their departure from the average and I'll be proved right... which would be nice if it wasn't entirely meaningless.

My prediction should not be taken seriously. Firstly because it's a guess from a self-confessed non-scientist (I won't accept charlatan, sorry NeverMindTheBollocks). But also because these records and the data they are drawn from have large degrees of uncertainty. The best we can really say of any year is that it was among the hottest.

Further adding to the meaninglessness of this prediction is the inappropriate significance we place on records like this. A hot month, or year, is a tiny slice of data along a much greater timeline. When it comes to climate change, these records are nothing more than milestones along the road - they have no influence on the direction we are going, they simply remind us how far we have come.