4 ms·

The “record” in this case only goes back to 1979. But “hottest day since 1979” isn’t as clickbaity.

• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  It's quite likely to have been the world's hottest day since long before the record started though. Perhaps for many thousands of years. And all to soon, since hundreds of thousands of years. There was a brief rise spike in global temperatures in early Holocene, a little over 10k years ago, and we don't know the peak, but it seems likely we will cross past that all too soon, whatever that was. After that milestone, the next threshold would be sometime in the chaotic Eemian period, 115-130k years ago, one of a number of massive spikes during the largely glacier-filled largely-cooler Pliestocene, going back a million years. The Pilocene before it was cooler averages by far as well, until about 2.5 million years ago. That was the last time earth was steady state hotter than where we are rapidly heading. We won't ever know for sure where the historical thresholds to cross are. The Eemian probably had some fantastically hot days. But the statistical probability of having crossed to the hottest day in the Holocene is already, I think, non-zero. And climbing.