2024 has already broken multiple temperature records
Carbon Brief has published a comprehensive article containing multiple visualizations of global temperature data. The visualizations show that 2024 has already broken multiple temperature records.
As shown in Figure 1, the first four months of 2024 have seen the largest temperature anomaly since the 1940s. The temperature anomaly is the difference between the observed temperature and the average temperature over the period 1850-1900.
Figure 2 shows similar data, with a daily rather than monthly step.
Finally, Figure 3 shows the geographical distribution of the temperature anomaly. The redder the area, the greater the temperature anomaly. The map shows that almost the entire planet is affected.
I have often said it in my French-speaking newsletter, and the Carbon Brief article gives me the opportunity to repeat it: it is essential to fight global warming with solutions whose effectiveness has been demonstrated, at least partially, by the scientific literature. Nothing could be worse than failing to implement an effective ecological transition because we started to believe that ineffective "solutions" could work anyway.
The article is well worth a read. The data visualization work is also remarkable.
Zeke Hausfather
