“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.
If the USA goes to 0 (which is the most hilarious notion I’ve read all day) while other countries continue per the status quo, that still makes a difference. It helps to slow the increase, buying more time to actually solidify the numbers.
The thing is, while the consensus is that we need to do something, and that something needs to be done a lot, and fast, we don’t have any quantifiable numbers, just estimations that may be wildly underexaggerated.