A local climatologist basically said “We’ll remember 2023 as ‘the year it all started’”.
We can’t disappoint the stakeholders. Next 12 months needs to be hotter.
So can someone actually explain how we know that; let’s say, exactly 116,342 years ago it wasn’t half a degree hotter on average that year?
I get the global trends for hundreds of years to average out a general baseline of how temps were, but what is being tested or checked that say even 130 years ago the everage temp wasn’t warmer that year? It seems like this 12 months being the hottest is more like an educated and informed guess than an actual fact.
There are scientists who study ice cores. Every summer a bit of ice in the north pole melts exposing liquid water to the air and interacting with it. Every winter that liquid freezes again. What we are left with are layers of ice that have been frozen in different years. These layers go back thousands of years. With our knowledge of atomic physics, we know what kind of isotopes exist in the atmosphere at certain temperatures. With this knowledge we can calculate the temperature of the earth in years past. We can also measure the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that was present in the past. With this information we have found the is a direct relation to the temperature of the earth and the amount of CO2 present in the atmosphere.
I am sure someone can explain this better than me, but this is the jist of it.
If it only exposes liquid water in the summer then it’s not recording a full year’s worth of interaction, seems like a pretty foundational flaw in their method.
