An increase of 0.6 degrees Celsius may seem insignificant, but this can be put into perspective with a comparison to the human body: a normal body temperature is 36.7 degrees Celsius (98.1 degrees Fahrenheit), but an increase of a mere 0.3 degrees makes the person sick (98.6 degrees).First off, I'm not so sure that a person with a 98.6 F temperature is "sick".
Some information from a David Archibald paper (available here) puts the modest 20th century warming into perspective:
What is also interesting is the 2.2° temperature rise from 7.8° in 1696 to 10.0° in 1732. This is a 2.2° rise is 36 years [in Central England]. By comparison, the world has seen a 0.6° rise over the 100 years of the 20th century. That temperature rise in the early 18th century was four times as large and three times as fast as the rise in the 20th century.
The significance of this is that the world can experience very rapid temperature swings all due to natural causes. The temperature peak of 10° in 1732 wasn’t reached again until 1947.
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