Because oceans have an enormous capacity to absorb atmospheric heat, it takes a long time to raise the average temperature of the lower atmosphere by an appreciable margin. During the late 2010s, after a couple of centuries of accelerated burning of fossil fuels, the temperature averaged across global land and ocean surfaces was almost 1°C above the 20th-century mean. It has been documented on all continents, but it has not been evenly distributed: as Arrhenius rightly predicted, higher latitudes have seen much higher average increases than the mid-latitudes or the tropics. In terms of the
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