Ok this is an idiot question but how does the global average temperature change so much over the course of a year. Is the northern hemisphere warmer overall during its summer compared to the southern hemisphere in its summer?
I don’t know the answer and was wondering the same thing, but the southern hemisphere has a lot more ocean, which I’m guessing is the difference.
There are potentially thousands of interdependent variables that impact climate, on both a local and global scale.
Everything from the slight variations in the suns energy, the extent of ice (reflects heat), chemical composition of the atmosphere/land/oceans (including everything we emit), existing distribution of energy (GHG’s trap more energy in the system), geography and terrain, to the plants and animals.
The reason we can’t reliably predict the weather beyond a week in advance is due to this enormous amount of variables. In statistics, attempting to model the behaviour of 1 variable via its dependent variables becomes extremely difficult beyond a relatively small number, especially when there are multiple confounding variables — the weather and climate is that, except there’s hundreds/thousands of dependent and confounding variables that impact each other. All we can do is provide a probability distribution or range.
That’s also why climate scientists stress for warming to be limited as much as possible, because every 0.1 c increase in temp, increases the volatility and uncertainty of the modelling; feedback loops exponentially increase the complexity (predictability) and, if triggered, could render all our existing climate modelling devastatingly inaccurate.
NOTE: GHG’s are the strongest variable that we have any control over, and the probability distribution of climate modelling over the last 50 years has been extremely accurate — that is to say that the majority of historic modelling predicted where we are today as the most probable.
This is correct. Water has an extremely high heat capacity, meaning that it takes a lot of energy to warm or cool it by any noticable amount. Land does not. So while the different amount of sunlight in summer/winter changes the land temperature by a large amount, the ocean barely changes. Most of the land on Earth is in the northern hemisphere and therefore we get those temperature swings.
I would presume the Earth would be hottest during periapsis (closest point to the Sun in its orbit) and coolest during apoapsis (furthest point to the Sun in its orbit).
Good guess, but doesn’t look like it: July is when the Earth is at its furthest point from the sun.
There is a theory based around how ocean tankers’ exhaust historically included sulfates, which can actually seed cloud formation.
Recent emissions regulations reduced this effect, so fewer clouds are being seeded over the ocean, and the oceans are absorbing more sunlight and heating more.
So we were basically painting large swaths of reflective clouds over the oceans, masking the heating. And now we’re seeing unencumbered heating effects.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In 2016, influenced by a strong El Niño event - a natural climate shift that tends to increase global temperatures - the world saw around 75 days that went above that mark.
One theory - which is still uncertain - is that a fall in air pollution from shipping across the North Atlantic has reduced the number of small particles and increased warming.
Up until now, these “aerosols” had been partly offsetting the effect of greenhouse gas emissions by reflecting some of the sun’s energy and keeping the Earth’s surface cooler than it would have been otherwise.
While the northern hemisphere will naturally cool in autumn and winter, there is a view that the large temperature differences from the pre-industrial period may persist, especially as El Niño reaches a peak at the end of this year or early next.
Researchers believe that these ongoing high temperature anomalies should be a wake-up call for political leaders, who will gather in Dubai in November for the COP28 climate summit.
In March, the UN urged countries to accelerate climate action, stressing effective options to reduce emissions were available now, from renewables to electric vehicles.
The original article contains 1,138 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
lol
lmao
😂 💀
Earth
