The first map is quite remarkable: even in this record-setting year, there is still a big swath of the US that is cooler than the historical average, or only very slightly warmer. This has been a pattern for a while.
It almost feels like a conspiracy: the part of the world that is ideologically predisposed to disbelieve in climate change is also the one that is (partly) avoiding it. And that part is the linchpin: other places are disinclined to do the hard work of fixing the climate while the US prominently denies that the problem even exists.
It's as if the earth wanted to keep warming.
Obviously not, of course, and I don't really know if it really figures into it one way or the other. But it still strikes me as weird. How different would the situation be if the US midwest and south were on the hotter side of the scale, rather than the cooler one?
It almost feels like a conspiracy: the part of the world that is ideologically predisposed to disbelieve in climate change is also the one that is (partly) avoiding it. And that part is the linchpin: other places are disinclined to do the hard work of fixing the climate while the US prominently denies that the problem even exists.
It's as if the earth wanted to keep warming.
Obviously not, of course, and I don't really know if it really figures into it one way or the other. But it still strikes me as weird. How different would the situation be if the US midwest and south were on the hotter side of the scale, rather than the cooler one?