BANGOR DAILY NEWS • April 1, 2024
When there was strong warming on our planet (like at the end of the last Ice Age around 11,000 years ago), there were sudden big leaps in the global temperature. It wasn’t a smooth process at all. The worrisome part of the current warming is not just that it has given us the hottest year on record. We’ve been breaking old records for some time now, as you would expect when you keep putting 40 billion tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year. It’s the scale of the rise in temperature this year: two-tenths of a degree Celsius. Climate scientists are calling it an “anomaly,” which is not so much an explanation as an admission that they can’t explain it. Changes in average global temperature from one year to another tend to be quite small. This one is gigantic. ~ Gwynne Dyer