As Climate Change Speeds Up, the Number of Extremely Hot Days Is Soaring

The number of very hot days have soared in the past 15 years, a new study in the journal Nature Climate Change reports.  Based on observations, the authors conclude that “the term pause, as applied to the recent evolution of global annual mean temperatures, is ill-chosen and even misleading in the context of climate change.”

As Climate Progress has repeatedly reported, mean surface temperatures have slowed only a little in recent years, the factors causing that are well understood, and when they reverse, warming will accelerate.  But the authors of this new study reject the term “pause” entirely:

… it is land-based changes in extreme temperatures, particularly those in hot extremes in inhabited areas, that have the most relevance for impacts.  It seems only justifiable to discuss a possible pause in the Earth’s temperature increase if this term applies to a general behaviour of the climate system, and thus also to temperature extremes.

However, we show that analyses based on observational data reveal no pause in the evolution of hot extremes over land since 1997.

As Climate Change Speeds Up, the Number of Extremely Hot Days Is Soaring