“There’s no ambiguity about the data,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “So really, it’s a question of attribution.”
Understanding what specific physical processes are behind these temperature records will help scientists improve their climate models and better predict temperatures in the future.
It does have to be. Because humans continue to make that decision, day in and day out, and ignore graphs like this. They ignore the blistering hot unprecedented Summer temps, the Arctic blasts, the hurricanes, the hailstorms, the increased insurance rates or even the unavailability of insurance altogether. They just keep driving their F150s to the office in rush hour traffic while heating hundreds of gallons of water in their pools that go unused 99.9% of the time.