Dr Zeke Hausfather, a climatologist with the University of California, Berkeley, says it is hard to capture the extraordinary heat of the previous year by looking at averages. Instead, he looks at the awful peaks, noting extremes recorded in the Arctic and Antarctic, parts of Asia and the Americas. For periods of the northern summer, the waters off parts of Florida reached an unimaginable 38 degrees, beating a previous world-record water surface temperature in Kuwait Bay in 2020. “That is a hot-tub temperature,” he says.
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