2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #17

A listing of 31 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, April 21, 2024 thru Sat, April 27, 2024.

Story of the weekScreen capture of CarbonBrief news item.

Anthropogenic climate change may be the ultimate shaggy dog story— but with a twist, because here endless subplots definitely depend upon one central element in the unfolding drama of our grand physics accident: the dominant story mechanic is that we're changing Earth's climate. This leads to outcomes. One way of seeing this is via the abstraction of statistics, while another perspective is that of individual experiences each of which is only an anecdote but together lead us back to statistics. Our story of the week is Carbon Brief's annual summary State of the climate: 2024 off to a record-warm start:

This year is shaping up to either match or surpass 2023 as the hottest year on record.

Global temperatures have been exceptionally high over the past three months – at around 1.6C above pre-industrial levels – following the peak of current El Niño event at the start of 2024.

The past 10 months have all set new all-time monthly temperature records, though the margin by which new records have been set has fallen from around 0.3C last year to 0.1C over the first three months of 2024. 

April 2024 is on track to extend this streak to 11 record months in a row.

Author Zeke Hausfather continues this informative summary by delivering a complete numerical rundown of where we stand with regard to global surface temperature. In sum we're we're living a spike. Our shock is belated. Expert opinion suggests we're  experiencing another wiggle in a upward-trending graph. We've seen this before in historical records, only less remarked given we're only now having our first brush with 1.5 °C of overall warming.  In any case, the directed herky jerky plot of global warming inevitably unfolds a bevy of subplots exemplified by other stories from this week's roundup, "anecdotes" in the grand scheme of global temperature records:

This shaggy dog story will continue to proliferate and evolve while we wait to reach our next record year. 

Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:

Before April 21

April 21

April 22

April 23

April 24

April 25

April 26

April 27

If you happen upon high quality climate-science and/or climate-myth busting articles from reliable sources while surfing the web, please feel free to submit them via this Google form so that we may share them widely. Thanks!

Posted by BaerbelW on Sunday, 28 April, 2024


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