this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
491 points (97.7% liked)
World News
32321 readers
1175 users here now
News from around the world!
Rules:
-
Please only post links to actual news sources, no tabloid sites, etc
-
No NSFW content
-
No hate speech, bigotry, propaganda, etc
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Ok this is an idiot question but how does the global average temperature change so much over the course of a year. Is the northern hemisphere warmer overall during its summer compared to the southern hemisphere in its summer?
I don't know the answer and was wondering the same thing, but the southern hemisphere has a lot more ocean, which I'm guessing is the difference.
This is correct. Water has an extremely high heat capacity, meaning that it takes a lot of energy to warm or cool it by any noticable amount. Land does not. So while the different amount of sunlight in summer/winter changes the land temperature by a large amount, the ocean barely changes. Most of the land on Earth is in the northern hemisphere and therefore we get those temperature swings.