We must fight climate-change denial with scientific evidence

What Trump called a 'con job' is a real crisis that we can't dismiss

- MARK GONGLOFF

The planet is dangerously close to the 2015 Paris pact's stretch goal.

(ISTOCKPHOTO)

Every now and then, you come across a piece of evidence that feels strong enough to cut through the noise and change minds. Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, recently produced a stark illustration of just how quickly the planet we inhabit is heating up as a result of the greenhouse gases that humans pump into the atmosphere. It's a chart, published in his Substack newsletter called The Climate Brink (shorturl.at/TDi6s), breaking down the proportion of the world’s land that has experienced its hottest month on record in each decade since the 1870s.

It reveals that very little of our land surface experienced such records before the 20th century. In contrast, roughly 78% of it set temperature records in the 21st century. And 38% set records in the 2020s—despite the fact that the decade is only halfway done.

This pairs well with another chart that is quite eyeopening (shorturl.at/2c63l) from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa). It shows the change in average global surface temperature over the past 145 years. That has risen more or less steadily over the past five decades, recently hitting 1.3° Celsius (about 2.3° Fahrenheit) above the average for the period from 1951 to 1980.