“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.
There was an international treaty to cut the amount of sulfur in the bunker oil that the big ships burn. This is because the particulates it produces when burned kill people. They also reflected a bunch of sunlight, preventing it from warming the water.