The highest land-surface temperatures have been recorded in recent decades; the world is getting hotter – and fast
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 is heating up as a result of the greenhouse gases humans pump into the atmosphere. It’s a chart, published in his Substack newsletter, The Climate Brink, breaking down the percentage of the world’s land that has experienced its hottest month on record in each decade since the 1870s.
The chart reveals that very little of our land surface experienced such records before the 20th century. In contrast, roughly 78 per cent of it set temperature records in the 21st century. And 38 per cent set records in the 2020s – despite the fact that the decade is only halfway done.
