A listing of 34 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, March 31, 2024 thru Sat, April 6, 2024.
Story of the week Proxy measurement via Facebook 'engagement' suggests a widely welcoming audience for Prof. Andrew Dessler's The Climate Brink article How extreme was the Earth's temperature in 2023. With our recent Earth surface temperature record gaining prominent media coverage— including many direct remarks by scientists employing adjectives not normally found in scientific parlance— it's not surprising that readers may appreciate an oasis of context and perspective of the kind Dessler provides. A couple of well supported key points come through in this treatment. Only a few years ago we saw a surface temperature graph remarkably similar to what's unrolling right now. Meanwhile, our recent experience remains within projections of climate models and can't truly be seen as an unanticipated outcome (do let's note: as usual we're seeing how climate models are fit for purpose and yield useful climate prognosis). Untreated in popularized analysis is the recent behavior of the world ocean's temperature. Given the much larger amount of energy involved and our general discomfort with hugely consequential mysteries of this kind, it would be helpful to have this gap plugged— but that is a more fundamentally difficult scientific problem.