There isn't really a zero. In its billions of years of history, Earth's temperature has fluctuated widely between large extremes, as far as we can tell extrapolating from traces we've found. Within "recent" history, its temperature has fluctuated between ice ages and warm periods, each of which last some hundreds of thousands of years, and the few thousand years of human existence seems to coincide with the tail end of an ice age (though keep in mind we're talking about very large time frames).
The actual anomaly is not the temperatures, but how absurdly rapid they change year over year.
on the chart in the article is “each month compared to the 20th century average of 12.2°C”, so that’s the zero line in this instance
Thanks.
Some of us would kill for 14.2 deg C.
Well that is what will happen.. one part of the world will get a more temperate climate and at the same time, quite literally, kill people in warmer parts of the world who contributed a lot less to the problem.
I know you didn't mean it that way but...lots of people will die and it is not funny.
Vikings killed even before the advent of industrialisation and when the temperatures were below freezing most of the time in the year (it still is for many Europeans and Canadians).
I dont think the killing part is a function of mean surface temp change.
My sense is that there will be a lot more killings when global poverty rates increase from unavailability of cheap reliable energy.
Anomaly or not, nobody likes to bake at 50C, so that zero line is probably ideal.