I apparently also ran out of memory for the site as too many people tried to view it at the same time. Updating it to a more robust hosting plan for the moment!
Fair enough but I find it dismaying to think enhanced greenhouse is locked in for 1.6 C to 2.6 C and people are talking about whether we can still stay under 1.5 C
I'm not sure I'd say its locked in per se; if all GHGs go to zero our best estimate is a net cooling (after a decade-scale warming bump) as CH4 and other shorter-lived species are removed from the atmosphere.
But thats assuming we can dramatically cut non-CO2 GHGs, which is challenging as a sizable portion come from agricultural systems.
Which is absolutely why we have to crank up albedo now and call the kettle (or Earth) black. It's a pipedream and the mother of moral hazards to assume we'll tame ghgs in time to avoid catastrophic climate meltdown.
[Disclaimer: Gemini added a single sentence. I wrote the rest. -MA]
Jeff, I agree assuming the globe will decarbonize before an arbitrary GMST threshold is reached, is a moral hazard if it delays decarbonization. I'm not convinced the fallback is "crank up albedo now" however. Yet I'm neither a nihilistic doomer nor a cockeyed optimist, mostly because catastrophe is in the eyes of the victim: while under any scenario, in another 25 years (knocks on head) at most I'll be dead. Here's where the moral hazards arise:
Climate catastrophe will come later for some than for others. Bear in mind that 1.5°C of warming has already been catastrophic for a large proportion of the world's 8 billion people, with up to four million deaths to date, and cumulative damages in the $trillions. But those who've profited by selling fossil fuels for all the traffic will bear while socializing their climate-change cost, enjoy a net benefit from continued warming for as long they live. *Your* personal GMST threshold depends a lot on where on the globe you live, and what your private and social resources for adaptation are.
That means capping the trend of GMST at any value past the 1.5°C rise to date, is a collective action, i.e. political, problem: a tragedy of the commons. The social tragedy of each increment of warming can only be mitigated collectively: Hardin's "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon".
Political sovereignty currently resides in nations, democratic or otherwise, so collective decarbonization under voluntary international commitments will be country by country, at their own national cost, to the equal benefit of themselves and everyone else. SRM or other geoengineering "solutions" to the rising GMST trend alone, OTOH, carry indeterminate social costs e.g. unabated ocean acidification, and threaten terminal shock, but can be undertaken by selfish individual or national actors for their own net benefit, at net cost to involuntary others. Talk about a moral hazard! I'd rather see those of us who have resources to adapt to warming give proportionate help to those who don't, come what may.
Again, I'm a realist, not a doomer. For now I'm just glad to live where I do, and have private and social resources to, erm, "weather" the inevitable additional warming. As long as my electricity stays on! My next major home improvement will be rooftop solar panels and a home-scale battery. Ironically, the refusal of my fellow Americans to collectively take the profit out of selling fossil carbon has not only made artificial cooling a necessity where it was formerly a luxury, but has allowed my retirement funds to grow faster than I expected 38 years ago. TBH, I'm still mulling that one over.
Am for "pedal to the metal" on drawdown no matter what. At least try and give it a better shot. Problem is carbon sinks are getting plugged along the way and new carbon sources are being born and drawdown is becoming like a dog chasing its tail. To stop the madness we have to collectively agree we have to stop this insanity🥵 by first admitting our lame and even if improved drawdown pathways are not enough.
You mentioned mutual. Beautiful! Gotta be a collective ( there are over 8 billion bodies to help ) effort. We are all in this together. Noone or company should be privy to globally effected solutions.
Srm starts with urban cooling by reflection and can be expanded to surface reflection in many spots to save water and cool ambient zones.
The big case of surface reflection having merit was in Spain in their greenhouse region where kilometers around the area dropped a few degrees C.
And, we gotta call the Earth kettle black and perfect MCB and SAI.. being prpared. Even OIF is SRM plus CDR.
We gotta protect life now from succumbing besides kicking cans for unknown pipedreams.
Even if global average temperature declines after a warming bump I think we should not ignore or downplay the bump.
Admittedly I think it is public perceptions rather than expert knowledge that are affected and this is only a small part of public perceptions but when our leaders tossed it to public opinion/will of the people instead of treating it as their duty of care with due diligence public perceptions became critical to getting them to treat it with the seriousness needed.
I’m a particular fan of the “Joy Division” graph. I know the atmosphere is your thing but would love to see something like this (particularly projection v actual for the last 5 years) for sea temps.
The x-axis shows the distribution of anomalies for each year, with the height indicating the frequency of that anomaly occuring. The area under each of the curves adds up to 100%. Its just a standard probability density function: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_density_function
I think these great charts would be more impactful to an American audience if they used Fahrenheit instead of Celsius. A 2 deg C increase doesn’t “feel” like a 3.6 deg F increase.
"Most models overlook this, but the AIO (African Injection Oscillation) model shows that the stratosphere is the true 'creator' here. I've been tracking 70 hPa humidity levels, and the current data explains this extreme shift perfectly. It’s all about the stratospheric press. Follow my profile for the full research and charts."
In the Global Temperature Anomaly Distribution graph has the overall *shape* of the distribution changed in any consistent way eg become more left/right skewed, more bimodal etc?
The month vs year time series of temperatures is interesting and highlights the dominance of the Northern Hemisphere, i.e. land. So it would be great to see these for land vs ocean. This way the canceling effects between the two hemispheres would be ameliorated also.
Thanks Kevin; ERA5 conveniently provides a daily-updated GMST timeseries, but to my knowledge does not have readily available global land and ocean averages. To make a daily version of that would involve downloading and processing the full 0.25x0.25 resolution global field, which is on my list of things to do but is also a much bigger project (since we are talking about hundreds of gigabytes it not petabytes of data...).
This is great! Woud be good, as you add features (if you do) to add the ability to broaden the averaging window to mulityear-to-decadal timescales. Often in advice I've prepared (for the Australian government) I've created plots that average the most recent decade, the one before that, etc. For the purpose of making the point that although there is interannual variability, each decade since the ~1970s has been warmer than the decade prior. So, now in 2026, I'd compare the decade 2016-2025 to the decade 2006-2015, and so on. I've always done that in a rather clunky brute-force way, but the dashboard could automate and update regularly. 10-year window being arbitrary but easy for policymakers to understand.
A plot of warming by decade is useful, though might not be the best fit for a real time dashboard (since it only updates once a year). That being said, I strongly prefer using a locally linear regression to remove short-term variability rather than binning by arbitrary periods. E.g. the red line we use in our Berkeley Earth figures: https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2025/
Also reminded me that trend lines sometimes facilitate motivated reasoning. For 10+ years, some people kept pretending the trend started from the peak in 1998. "See, a plateau!"
I apparently also ran out of memory for the site as too many people tried to view it at the same time. Updating it to a more robust hosting plan for the moment!
Zeke, this is awesome! Great work putting that together. It's very clear even at a quick glance.
A 'What The Temperatures would be Without Sulfate Aerosols' graph might be instructive.
Wish I know the answer (aside from +0.2C to +1.2C warmer)!
Fair enough but I find it dismaying to think enhanced greenhouse is locked in for 1.6 C to 2.6 C and people are talking about whether we can still stay under 1.5 C
I'm not sure I'd say its locked in per se; if all GHGs go to zero our best estimate is a net cooling (after a decade-scale warming bump) as CH4 and other shorter-lived species are removed from the atmosphere.
But thats assuming we can dramatically cut non-CO2 GHGs, which is challenging as a sizable portion come from agricultural systems.
Which is absolutely why we have to crank up albedo now and call the kettle (or Earth) black. It's a pipedream and the mother of moral hazards to assume we'll tame ghgs in time to avoid catastrophic climate meltdown.
Am not a doomer. Am a realist.
[last edited 1000 AM PST Feb. 10 2026]
[Disclaimer: Gemini added a single sentence. I wrote the rest. -MA]
Jeff, I agree assuming the globe will decarbonize before an arbitrary GMST threshold is reached, is a moral hazard if it delays decarbonization. I'm not convinced the fallback is "crank up albedo now" however. Yet I'm neither a nihilistic doomer nor a cockeyed optimist, mostly because catastrophe is in the eyes of the victim: while under any scenario, in another 25 years (knocks on head) at most I'll be dead. Here's where the moral hazards arise:
Climate catastrophe will come later for some than for others. Bear in mind that 1.5°C of warming has already been catastrophic for a large proportion of the world's 8 billion people, with up to four million deaths to date, and cumulative damages in the $trillions. But those who've profited by selling fossil fuels for all the traffic will bear while socializing their climate-change cost, enjoy a net benefit from continued warming for as long they live. *Your* personal GMST threshold depends a lot on where on the globe you live, and what your private and social resources for adaptation are.
That means capping the trend of GMST at any value past the 1.5°C rise to date, is a collective action, i.e. political, problem: a tragedy of the commons. The social tragedy of each increment of warming can only be mitigated collectively: Hardin's "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon".
Political sovereignty currently resides in nations, democratic or otherwise, so collective decarbonization under voluntary international commitments will be country by country, at their own national cost, to the equal benefit of themselves and everyone else. SRM or other geoengineering "solutions" to the rising GMST trend alone, OTOH, carry indeterminate social costs e.g. unabated ocean acidification, and threaten terminal shock, but can be undertaken by selfish individual or national actors for their own net benefit, at net cost to involuntary others. Talk about a moral hazard! I'd rather see those of us who have resources to adapt to warming give proportionate help to those who don't, come what may.
Again, I'm a realist, not a doomer. For now I'm just glad to live where I do, and have private and social resources to, erm, "weather" the inevitable additional warming. As long as my electricity stays on! My next major home improvement will be rooftop solar panels and a home-scale battery. Ironically, the refusal of my fellow Americans to collectively take the profit out of selling fossil carbon has not only made artificial cooling a necessity where it was formerly a luxury, but has allowed my retirement funds to grow faster than I expected 38 years ago. TBH, I'm still mulling that one over.
Well put Mal!
Am for "pedal to the metal" on drawdown no matter what. At least try and give it a better shot. Problem is carbon sinks are getting plugged along the way and new carbon sources are being born and drawdown is becoming like a dog chasing its tail. To stop the madness we have to collectively agree we have to stop this insanity🥵 by first admitting our lame and even if improved drawdown pathways are not enough.
You mentioned mutual. Beautiful! Gotta be a collective ( there are over 8 billion bodies to help ) effort. We are all in this together. Noone or company should be privy to globally effected solutions.
Srm starts with urban cooling by reflection and can be expanded to surface reflection in many spots to save water and cool ambient zones.
The big case of surface reflection having merit was in Spain in their greenhouse region where kilometers around the area dropped a few degrees C.
And, we gotta call the Earth kettle black and perfect MCB and SAI.. being prpared. Even OIF is SRM plus CDR.
We gotta protect life now from succumbing besides kicking cans for unknown pipedreams.
I call them "pipemares".
Even if global average temperature declines after a warming bump I think we should not ignore or downplay the bump.
Admittedly I think it is public perceptions rather than expert knowledge that are affected and this is only a small part of public perceptions but when our leaders tossed it to public opinion/will of the people instead of treating it as their duty of care with due diligence public perceptions became critical to getting them to treat it with the seriousness needed.
I’m a particular fan of the “Joy Division” graph. I know the atmosphere is your thing but would love to see something like this (particularly projection v actual for the last 5 years) for sea temps.
I can't claim credit for the original idea; I think it was the BBC graphics team who made the first version back in 2024.
Yes, another vote for SSTs please ! 💙 🌊
What an incredible resource!
This is fabulous Zeke. What's the width of the "peaks" on the Unknown Pleasures chart?
The x-axis shows the distribution of anomalies for each year, with the height indicating the frequency of that anomaly occuring. The area under each of the curves adds up to 100%. Its just a standard probability density function: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_density_function
distribution of daily anomalies?
Yep
I think these great charts would be more impactful to an American audience if they used Fahrenheit instead of Celsius. A 2 deg C increase doesn’t “feel” like a 3.6 deg F increase.
"Most models overlook this, but the AIO (African Injection Oscillation) model shows that the stratosphere is the true 'creator' here. I've been tracking 70 hPa humidity levels, and the current data explains this extreme shift perfectly. It’s all about the stratospheric press. Follow my profile for the full research and charts."
Excellent work - looks great !
Future addition of SSTs would be very useful. 💙 🌊
You can perhaps request this from ECMWF. They are quite responsive to requests. It requires a good land sea mask.
Kevin
Dr Hausfather, GGGGREAT JOB! Always looking at gov sites for this and that but this is super!
Can albedo ( general ), aerosol, and cloud coverage be included?
Thanks!
In the Global Temperature Anomaly Distribution graph has the overall *shape* of the distribution changed in any consistent way eg become more left/right skewed, more bimodal etc?
If so, what does the tell us, if anything?
It has narrowed a bit over time, but thats primarily driven by cooler parts of the world (e.g. high latitude regions) warming faster than the tropics.
Zeke
This is wonderful
The month vs year time series of temperatures is interesting and highlights the dominance of the Northern Hemisphere, i.e. land. So it would be great to see these for land vs ocean. This way the canceling effects between the two hemispheres would be ameliorated also.
Thanks Kevin; ERA5 conveniently provides a daily-updated GMST timeseries, but to my knowledge does not have readily available global land and ocean averages. To make a daily version of that would involve downloading and processing the full 0.25x0.25 resolution global field, which is on my list of things to do but is also a much bigger project (since we are talking about hundreds of gigabytes it not petabytes of data...).
Brilliant, thankyou.
Can you please also post a simple graph tracking CO2 ppm from 1850 till present day
This is great! Woud be good, as you add features (if you do) to add the ability to broaden the averaging window to mulityear-to-decadal timescales. Often in advice I've prepared (for the Australian government) I've created plots that average the most recent decade, the one before that, etc. For the purpose of making the point that although there is interannual variability, each decade since the ~1970s has been warmer than the decade prior. So, now in 2026, I'd compare the decade 2016-2025 to the decade 2006-2015, and so on. I've always done that in a rather clunky brute-force way, but the dashboard could automate and update regularly. 10-year window being arbitrary but easy for policymakers to understand.
A plot of warming by decade is useful, though might not be the best fit for a real time dashboard (since it only updates once a year). That being said, I strongly prefer using a locally linear regression to remove short-term variability rather than binning by arbitrary periods. E.g. the red line we use in our Berkeley Earth figures: https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2025/
This is fantastic!
Also reminded me that trend lines sometimes facilitate motivated reasoning. For 10+ years, some people kept pretending the trend started from the peak in 1998. "See, a plateau!"