The sun rises amid high temperatures in Mexico City on May 23, 2024. Extreme heat across Mexico, Central America, and parts of the U.S. South has left millions sweltering, strained energy grids, and even caused iconic Howler monkeys in Mexico to drop dead from trees.
Every now and then, a piece of evidence emerges that cuts through the noise and changes minds. Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, recently produced a stark illustration of how quickly our planet is heating due to greenhouse gases emitted by humans.
In his Substack newsletter, *The Climate Brink*, Hausfather published a chart breaking down the percentage of the world’s land that has experienced its hottest month on record in each decade since the 1870s. The data reveals that very little of Earth’s land surface experienced such temperature records before the 20th century. In contrast:
– Roughly 78% of land set new temperature records in the 21st century.
– 38% of land has already set records in the 2020s — despite the decade being only halfway over.
Put simply, the world is getting hotter, and fast.
This pairs well with another eye-opening chart from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which shows the change in average global surface temperature over the past 145 years. The temperature has risen more or less steadily over the past five decades, recently hitting 1.3 degrees Celsius (about 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1951-1980 average.
We are now dangerously close to the stretch goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which aims to limit heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial averages — roughly corresponding to the NASA baseline.
These compelling graphics directly refute at least two major talking points used by climate-change deniers to delay action and perpetuate fossil fuel dependency.
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### Debunking Myths
**Myth 1: Climate Change Is a “Greatest Con Job”**
Former President Donald Trump, often regarded as a major climate denier, stated at the United Nations:
> “If you look back years ago, in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said, ‘Global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something.’ Then they said global warming will kill the world, but then it started getting cooler. So now they just call it climate change because that way they can’t miss. Climate change because if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, there’s climate change. It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.”
As the charts clearly demonstrate, while the world may have cooled for some decades after the 1930s, the long-term trend since the 1970s is a steady increase in temperature. In fact, the past 100 years have been the hottest in recorded human history.
Adding to this, a striking chart published in 2023 by Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University and co-author with Hausfather at *The Climate Brink*, tracks global temperatures since the last ice age—and projects thousands of years into the future. It illustrates how we are reversing centuries of planetary cooling in the blink of a geological eye. Achieving such a rapid shift requires an unprecedented surge in carbon dioxide emissions, a feat accomplished by human activity.
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**Myth 2: The World Was Hotter in the 1930s**
Trump’s Department of Energy recently released a 141-page report attempting to rebut established climate science, suggesting the world was hotter in the 1930s than today. This claim has widely been criticized and debunked.
It is true that the US experienced exceptional heat during the Dust Bowl decade, with heat-wave intensity in the lower 48 states at its highest on record according to Environmental Protection Agency data. Hausfather’s chart shows that about 3% of 1930s temperature records still stand, including some parts of the US.
However, this was a localized anomaly, not a global trend. The Dust Bowl conditions resulted from a combination of bad farming practices that stripped land cover, intensifying drought and heat, compounded by a prolonged spike in ocean temperatures. This “perfect storm” generated excess heat that even reached Europe.
Meanwhile, much of the rest of the world remained relatively cool. The localized heat receded once ocean temperatures dropped and land management improved. Now, the heat is back—not only in the US but globally—as a direct consequence of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions.
At our current rate, the Dust Bowl era will soon appear as a comparatively cool interlude.
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### The Takeaway
Climate change is a global trend, not a localized event or a “con job.” Cherry-picking data to deny this reality is a tactic designed to distract from the urgent work needed to mitigate warming.
Sharing charts like these is just the beginning. Stay informed and connected — understanding the facts equips us to push for meaningful action.
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*Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.*
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