September was the most anomalously hot month ever

1. please a reference to these record cold months and related discussions? curious, iirc see them starting more go the other way round, always. (what I remember, actually when was the last one really? Cause I only remember local record cold ones).

2. it is a trend and usually never one example put up as evidence, but the trend/frequency is unfortunateley clear?

This is about global temperature records. The reason your hypothetical conversation isn't parallel is because the last global cold record was 1903.[0]

In terms of localized cold records, they are becoming astonishingly rare to the point that they really don't even deserve mention.[1]

[0] https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/2023-01/ClimateD... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records#/med...

> Why is there a climate scientist working for a payments processor?

Without any explanatory details, this seems like a non-sequitur.

Or are you making a joke? Is this like the surrealist painters and bathtub one?

There's an interesting theory that surface warming of the Earth is proceeding in a staircase fashion, due to modulation of fossil-fuel-forced warming by El Nino events:

http://euanmearns.com/the-staircase-hypothesis-an-alternativ...

The driving mechanism for this phenomena would be release of stored heat from the oceans (which have been steadily absorbing much of the energy being trapped by increased atmospheric IR-absorbing gases like CO2 and CH4) during El Nino events.

> "The oceans can at times soak up a lot of heat. Some goes into the deep oceans where it can stay for centuries. But heat absorbed closer to the surface can easily flow back into the air. That happened in 1998, which made it one of the hottest years on record. (Trenberth 2013, see above source)"

This forms a prediction of sorts: if there is an another strong ENSO event this year, another stepwise climb of the staircase should play out over the next decade.

Note that even if we eliminated fossil fuel use and deforestation in a year, due to the long-term buffering effect of the ocean, it would take at least a century for the Earth's surface temperature to stabilize (assuming we don't trigger some 'natural' effect like massive marine sediment methane destabilization, etc.). This means as much effort will need to be devoted to adaptation to new conditions as to elimination of fossil fuels from the energy mix, assuming that we all agree that civilizational stability is a desirable goal.

Not eliminating fossil fuels and continuing with business as usual for the next few decades (*the current plan of all fossil fuel producers and affiliated nation-states from the USA to Venezuela to Saudi Arabia to Russia) means that when we do eventually stop, we're in a worse long-term prognosis.

> you can’t measure this on a monthly scale, it’s too slow of a process

You can somewhat measure global warming on a monthly scale. Just graph the last 100 years in average monthly temperatures and you will see a graph going steadily up. So it will be with a longer scale. In that sense, global warming is a longer process, yes. The problem with that is not that "you can't measure it". It's that explaining it to a non-believer does not fit on a tweet, and it counterdicts everything that they have been told from the media they consume.

A metaphor that can help is talking about overwheight.

If you have been gaining weight for years and then you do one of those "detox diets" and lose 2 kilograms in one month, but then you gain them back the next week, and another one the week after, you are not "losing weight". The curve went slightly downwards and then continued going up.

Similarly, if you have been steadily losing weight for years and then have some friends visit and you eat out a lot during that week and you gain some weight but you lose it again in the following weeks, you are still "losing weight". The curve went up a little bit but then it went down.

So the thing you are missing is the context we can talk about individual ups and downs, but they are meaningless without being put in the bigger context.