4 ms·

Strange not to have heard of this before, but it seems like it could be a really helpful metric. It's unfortunate that the data doesn't go back terribly far th

• jfengel 5y ago
  Temperature is a good proxy for energy imbalance. Temperature changes to push the energy imbalance back towards zero. That's something easily demonstrated in a laboratory; it's basic physics. We've got plenty of long-term temperature charts, calculated in a variety of different ways. Wikipedia seems as good a place to start as any: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record This metric isn't really new. It's just becoming public because somebody's hoping that a new way to look at the same information might finally click with somebody. There hasn't really been anything new for decades about climate change, except the long steady drumbeat of data confirming the predictions. Which is no surprise: the basic physics and chemistry of climate change is really quite straightforward and well understood.