What does this mean?
We probably should readjust what we consider normal to something veering further from the past years average and prepare for more extreme scenarios.
Also we probably should keep working on managing our emission of greenhouse gas to avoid things getting even worse.
As an aside, I don’t get all the people loudly expressing being depressed about the graphs and whatever. This is in line with predictions. People knew that was going to happen. It’s pretty useless to bemoan things which are unavoidable.
Humans aren't robots. We don't just have feelings connected to surprising events, but also to unsurprising ones. Why should people not have feelings on this topic?
You can say that feelings are useless in reaching a specific goal, but that is not what you initially said.
One tweet said he wasn't so much depressed about this happening, but about people doing nothing to stop it.
We've known this for over century, have had political debates about it for 3 decades, have made agreements to reduce our carbon emissions, but our carbon output keeps growing, and temperatures keep rising, and new coal power plants keep getting built.
We should have banned coal and oil power plants 2 decades ago. We should be investing only in emission-free power plants. We should have made fossil fuels too expensive to use for any purpose for which there are viable alternatives. We haven't done those things, and we're not going to do them any time soon, so these graphs will continue to get even worse in the future. That's what's depressing.
All of these are signs that climate change is getting worse and worse. And stuff is likely to get worse in the coming years. And if we don't do anything to dramatically reduce CO2 emissions, it's going to get even worse after that.
We do have the ability to turn this around, but we clearly lack the political will to do so. And the longer we wait, the worse it will get.
The graphs themselves do an excellent job of providing the relevant context — they show decades of previous context, with the current year highlighted. The context of the past decades is literally the point of how the graphs were designed. The titles on the graphs also further describe the context - "..temperature anomaly", "...ice extent anomaly".
The consequences of burning eons worth of stored hydrocarbons in a few decades are upon us. But attitudes like this are literally part of the problem.
We're seeing changes right now, are we not? People's lives are being impacted right now, are they not?
Seems to me like those who said "we'll start seeing significant changes in 1-2 decades" around 2 decades ago were right on the money.