Rising Temperatures in the Netherlands

That's a rather huge document just to respond to a single sentence (with someone's highlights, not sure if those are yours or whether to otherwise heed them). Feels a bit asymmetrical in the amount of effort one has to put in to understand your comment/point.

From reading the first page, I would say that this could be a summary / an answer to the statement of the person above you:

> when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

(The document seems to assume that you know the earth is an oblate spheroid or something: rather close to spherical, but off enough that it's noticeable under certain circumstances such as spaceflight.)

If that is indeed what you meant to say, I would recommend citing that part and adding the link for reference. That probably helps more people than just posting the document link by itself

It the perfect exception to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

Willful incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, and even accidental incompetence becomes malice if wielded by a figure with any modicum of power. Hanlon's razor is among the most backwards memes ever devised.

That seems to be an uncharacteristically poorly thought out argument from Asimov, who I have immense respect for otherwise. He's engaging in a simple strawman! The issue is him (Asimov) being critiqued for thinking we have finally gotten everything, more or less, correct - finally. The critic alleges to Asimov that he's falling for what I call 'the arrogance of the present.' For great minds in past centuries also certainly thought they had finally, more or less, worked everything out, and were invariably proven wrong. So what makes now different, beyond the fact that 'now' is the time we live in?

Asimov's argument is that modern ideas are 'less wrong' than those of times past. He then goes on to talk about flat Earth and geocentric views of times past, going so far as to literally suggest his critic, refusing to accept any certainty, might believe the Earth could be determined to be a cube next year. That's just deeply disingenuous by Asimov, and I suspect the issue flustered him.

The critic was obviously not suggesting that next year we might decide the Earth is cubical, but referencing modern theories like the luminiferous aether [1]. Asimov would have certainly been aware of such, but as I suspect you might not - it's an extremely interesting tale. The aether was had a tremendous amount of science and support around it. And it was also completely and absolutely wrong. Not incomplete, not even less wrong, just plain wrong. It was only proven to be wrong in the famous (and quite elaborate, by the standard of the times) Michelson-Morley experiment. [2] Yet so strongly supported was the aether, that Michelson actually assumed he made an experimental mistake when he failed to detect the aether. He rejected his own discovery! He has a very famous quote:

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"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."

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That quote was made in 1894, 7 years after proving the aether (and ultimately centuries of established science prior) wrong! He was still under the belief that he simply had yet to achieve the precision necessary to measure the aether! In fact so compelling was it, that it was really finally only put to rest by relativity, which showed the absurd nature of our reality - that the speed of light is a constant from all frames of reference. That only kicked off in 1905. And indeed there's every reason to expect that some, if not much, of what we think today may simply end up being seen as the aether of our times - well supported, logical, wrong.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper...

It should be more extreme for regions/countries closer to the North Pole. Temperature anomalies for i.e. Siberia had been more than +4ºC in recent years. And those regions may weight more than others because the positive feedback loops happening there that will affect the whole planet.