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Comment by correct_horse | Hacker News Reader

Slight correction - temperatures are not higher than ever before. The eocene (60 million years ago) was 10-14 degrees hotter than now. That level of warming would be bad to say the least, but it has easily been this hot before.

Also relevant, a few times in the Pleistocene, 20,000 years ago, temperatures peaked a couple degrees hotter than they are now.

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I believe the parent is talking about rate of change rather than absolute temperature. Discounting collisions with large meteors, the statement that the average temperature over time has never risen so fast is true.

Hm. I didn't consider that interpretation.

When someone talks about anything changing over a period of time, they are talking about slope. There really isn't another interpretation.

The post in question writes "have risen higher", which to me reads as if it's saying that the temperature, as a result of rising, is now higher than ever before, not that the rate of change is higher. I would expect something along the lines of "have risen faster" if we were describing the slope of the graph of temperature over time.

I don’t think that is true. I read it as the maximum, not the slope. The confusion is from the use of higher instead of faster. Faster would be the rate of change while higher is absolute value.

> We know for sure that the average temperatures have risen higher in the last 40 years than they have ever before.

This could be a year over year increase in maximum, with a very small slope too

Correct, horse (battery staple)! Sorry about that. This interpretation is what I intended - the rate of change has certainly increased like never before.

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