“There’s no ambiguity about the data,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “So really, it’s a question of attribution.”
Understanding what specific physical processes are behind these temperature records will help scientists improve their climate models and better predict temperatures in the future.
That’s part, but not enough to explain what we’re seeing, unless we’ve been significantly wrong about how impactful greenhouse gases and aerosols are.
Science suffers from a bias towards elegant explanations, maybe it’s just a fucking mess and we’re not going to find that one single thing to blame it on.
Thanks for the additional info!