for anything before 1880 and pre-history there's other sources like deep ice cores, geological strata, tree rings, etc. Not accurate, but good enough for an educated guess.
We can be pretty certain that something is happening, and we are not just seeing randomness. We can also be certain enough for practical purposes that we know what the cause is.
In a situation where the consequences will be nothing short of catastrophic on a global scale and we are already far too late, insisting on 100% academic purity is really not a sensible position.
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/extreme-makeov...
But when the weather is nasty, they say "Look at the climate change, denier!"
1: 2012, 2018, 2021, 2023, 2025 at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_dome
I'm very serious. And no, I am not a "climate denier". The earth is getting warmer, but you cannot measure it in discrete events like you're trying to do.
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/extreme-summer-weather-patt...
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2504482122
Why not at least do an internet search first?
1) The paper is very clear that it's talking about changes over a 50 year period, which is more than my entire life. It's certainly not something you're going to use to explain a particular hot day this year, or even an imagined increase in hot summer days over the past decade. In my lifetime, the regression line of their count of annual "QRA events" has gone from a bit less than 2, to a bit more than 2.
2) The phenomena discussed in the paper is described as a particular spectral decomposition pattern in the global upper atmosphere [1], not a frequency measurement of heat events. The pattern may be related to the weather, but like everything else in climate science, you can't use it to explain the outcome on a particular day. And it certainly doesn't explain the existence of what normal people call "hot summer days", which have, indeed, existed forever.
[1] Specifically: "A QRA event is counted as such if high-amplitude, quasi-stationary planetary waves of wave numbers 6, 7, or 8 are found in the atmospheric wind field in ERA5 data, and at the same time certain resonance conditions are met".
That's what the paper is about. They counted those, and plotted them in Figure 1: https://www.pnas.org/cms/10.1073/pnas.2504482122/asset/22f39...
Climate change is one of the only topics where people choose to be so pedantic, and frankly unnecessarily insulting.
No, that isn't what I said. Here is what I said:
> There have been "heat dome events" every year I've been alive. We just didn't call them that, because we used to call this phenomenon "summer".
I don't know how you get to "heat dome events aren't real" from that. They're real. They're also part of summer, but the terminology is new. The paper you cited, in fact, shows that they go back 50+ years. They're just slightly more frequent now.
> I guess the second or third time in a year we see heat domes is the only appropriate time to bring it up?
Again, you should actually look at the paper -- or just the first figure. I linked to it for you, so it couldn't be easier. You will see these events happening 4+ times a year going back into the 1950s. We're talking about a very subtle historical change, here.
Not saying or denying anything, but on a universe-al scale, 200 years is nothing, since some changes take longer.
It seems probable; likely even.
But how do we know? Is it a guess?
The very fact that New York hit this temperature in 1888 (pre industrial revolution) suggests that we can’t take it on faith, as we have at least one data point that suggests heat spikes like this have happened in recent planet history without extra atmospheric CO2.