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> The average increase is slow, steady,

I'm not sure about that. This year is a significant uptick from 3 years ago where I live (central Europe).

I did notice a slow warming since 2006 (when I moved to my current location), but even 2 years ago there were only a few summer nights where you could comfortably sit outside after dark without a jacket.

It has been that warm every single night this summer.

If you want to see it on a global scale, look at the oceans. It has been "steady" there, though not slow, https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/ocean-heat/

And most of the heat (90%) has gone into the ocean. Now the oceans are warm, so we will see it on land.

I'm expecting rapid acceleration over the next 10 years, not slow, and certainly not steady.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/01/extreme-...



> This year is a significant uptick from 3 years ago where I live

Too short a time scale and too localised geographically to count as "average". First time I visited the USA, I spent Christmas in CA, which was several degrees warmer than normal for the season, people were surfing[0]; at the same time, the east coast of the US was several degrees colder than normal for the season, it was snowing[0].

> If you want to see it on a global scale, look at the oceans. It has been "steady" there, though not slow, https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/ocean-heat/

Zettajoules without context is big and scary. But the Earth is an astronomical body and astronomical numbers are always big.

588 joules per square millimetre, sounds even scarier! But that doesn't tell me the depth over which the heat was added.

But fortunately I don't need to guess at that, as the temperature is easier to measure directly: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/

Using that heating figure and that energy figure, that's like heating a water planet by 0.85 C to a depth of about 370 m.

[0] For all I know both these things happen every year at Christmas in the US, but it still felt very bizarre to me as an outsider, and that year did have opposite temperature anomalies on the east and west coasts.




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