Every now and then, you come across a piece of evidence that feels strong enough to cut through the noise and change minds. Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, recently produced a stark illustration of just how quickly the planet we inhabit is heating up as a result of the greenhouse gases that humans pump into the atmosphere.
Every now and then, you come across a piece of evidence that feels strong enough to cut through the noise and change minds. Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, recently produced a stark illustration of just how quickly the planet we inhabit is heating up as a result of the greenhouse gases that humans pump into the atmosphere.
It’s a chart, published in his Substack newsletter called The Climate Brink, breaking down the proportion of the world’s land that has experienced its hottest month on record in each decade since the 1870s.
It’s a chart, published in his Substack newsletter called The Climate Brink, breaking down the proportion of the world’s land that has experienced its hottest month on record in each decade since the 1870s.
It reveals that very little of our land surface experienced such records before the 20th century. In contrast, roughly 78% of it set temperature records in the 21st century. And 38% set records in the 2020s—despite the fact that the decade is only halfway done.
This pairs well with another chart that is quite eye-opening from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa). It shows the change in average global surface temperature over the past 145 years. That has risen more or less steadily over the past five decades, recently hitting 1.3° Celsius (about 2.3° Fahrenheit) above the average for the period from 1951 to 1980.
We are getting dangerously close to the stretch goal of the 2015 Paris agreement to limit the planet’s overall heating to 1.5° Celsius above pre-industrial averages, which roughly match the Nasa baseline.
Hausfather’s graphics directly refute at least two big talking points climate-change deniers use to slow action and keep the world burning fossil fuels longer.
First, they give the lie to the central made-up fact in this recent diatribe from US President Donald Trump, the world’s ‘denier-in-chief,’ delivered recently at the United Nations’s General Assembly:
“If you look back years ago, in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said, ‘Global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something.’ Then they said global warming will kill the world, but then it started getting cooler. So now they just call it climate change because that way they can’t miss. Climate change because if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, there’s climate change. It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.” [Emphasis added]
The charts show that the world may have cooled for a stretch of decades after the 1930s (more on this issue later), but has gotten steadily hotter since the 1970s.
If anything, the past 100 years have been the hottest in recorded human history, as you can see in another striking chart published in 2023 by Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University and Hausfather’s co-author at The Climate Brink.
It tracks global temperatures since the latest ice age and projects them thousands of years into the future to show how we are reversing an ice age’s worth of planetary cooling in the blink of a geological eye. It takes an epochal discharge of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to accomplish such a feat.
The second climate-change denier bromide these charts address is the myth that the world was actually hotter back in the 1930s, as Trump’s Department of Energy recently suggested in its 141-page attempt to rebut established climate science, an effort that was widely derided as a failure.
It is true the US landmass was unusually hot during the so-called Dust Bowl decade, when heat-wave intensity in the lower 48 states of America was the highest on record, according to Environmental Protection Agency data. In fact, Hausfather’s chart shows that about 3% of 1930s temperature records still stand. That includes parts of the US.
But this was just a local anomaly, not a global trend. America’s Dust Bowl climate was a product of bad farming practices and bad timing. Land-stripping agricultural practices reduced ground cover, which intensified drought and heat, just in time for a long-lasting spike in ocean temperatures to amplify both. The combination generated excess heat that reached all the way to Europe.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world carried on being as cool as ever. The localized heat quickly dissipated once the ocean cooled and we stopped mistreating land in America.
Now that heat has come roaring back to the US and the rest of the world after decades of humanity filling the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases. At the rate we’re going, the Dust Bowl era will come to seem like a cool interlude in comparison. This is a global trend and cherry-picking data to deny its reality is a tactic meant to distract us from the work we must do to stop it. Waving around charts like these is only the beginning. ©Bloomberg
The author is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change.
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