Just wanted to finalize this thread.  I was able to successfully reference a file in HDFS for the data load.  So it seems like that is a good option in replace of LOCAL.  Not sure what you wanted to do about the nuance, but maybe an indicator in the 'file not found' error message indicating that beeline won't be able to accept LOCAL if the beeline client is not running on the Hive2 server?  (At my level of undertanding, I'd imagine most beeline clients won't be running on the same node as the Hive2 server.)

"....file not found.  NOTE:  LOCAL is not supported in beeline unless the beeline client is running on the same node as the HIVESERVER2.  A work around is to load the file to HDFS and then load from there."  Just a thought.

Thanks for your help and prompt response.

cloud@c-192-199-76-8:~> hadoop fs -ls /tmp
Found 7 items
drwxrwxrwx - hdfs supergroup 0 2015-01-26 14:54 /tmp/.cloudera_health_monitoring_canary_files
drwxr-xr-x - cloud supergroup 0 2015-01-22 21:47 /tmp/hive-cloud
drwxrwxrwx - hive supergroup 0 2014-10-28 21:34 /tmp/hive-hive
-rw-r--r-- 3 meee meee 1180101268 2015-01-23 19:52 /tmp/hourly_TEMP_2014.csv
drwxr-xr-x - hdfs supergroup 0 2014-11-07 18:06 /tmp/input
drwxrwxrwt - mapred hadoop 0 2014-11-19 16:45 /tmp/logs
drwxr-xr-x - hdfs supergroup 0 2014-11-07 18:33 /tmp/output
cloud@c-10-206-76-8:~> beeline -u jdbc:hive2://c-192-199-76-8.int.cis.trcloud:10000/default --verbose=true -n meee
issuing: !connect jdbc:hive2://c-192-199-76-8.int.cis.trcloud:10000/default meee''
scan complete in 3ms
Connecting to jdbc:hive2://c-192-199-76-8.int.cis.trcloud:10000/default
Connected to: Apache Hive (version 0.13.1-cdh5.2.0)
Driver: Hive JDBC (version 0.13.1-cdh5.2.0)
Transaction isolation: TRANSACTION_REPEATABLE_READ
Beeline version 0.13.1-cdh5.2.0 by Apache Hive
0: jdbc:hive2://c-192-199-76-8.int.cis.trcloud> load data inpath '/tmp/hourly_TEMP_2014.csv' into table temps_txt;
No rows affected (0.556 seconds)
0: jdbc:hive2://c-192-199-76-8.int.cis.trcloud> select avg(degrees) from temps_txt;
+--------------------+--+
| _c0 |
+--------------------+--+
| 56.87016100866962 |
+--------------------+--+
1 row selected (77.389 seconds)