It is a record hot year in America. As in whole degrees hotter than previous years, at least just looking at the summer.
I’m wondering, all else being equal, how much this raw temperature change will affect the global average temperature for the year. Basically multiply the area affected in the US by the rate at which it is above average divided by the world’s area. Will this bump up the global average temperature for this year by .1 degrees even if the rest of the world is the same temperature?
(Note that I am deliberately not taking into account whether or not it is correspondingly cooler or hotter in places other than the USA, nor am I asking how the heat will affect or has been effected by global climate systems. Both of which would tend to draw answers that would push the discussion more toward GD.)
The U.S. is less than 2% of the globe*, so the effect will be insignificant (not that it hasn’t been hot elsewhere, as this map shows, almost the entire global land area has been as warm as the U.S. in recent months).
*Area of lower 48 U.S. (Alaska and Hawaii are not included, note use of “contiguous U.S.”) is 3.12 million square miles, out of 197 million square miles, or 1.58%, so a 1C change in the U.S. translates to 0.016C globally (note - U.S. temperatures are in Fahrenheit while Celsius is used scientifically). For comparison, the margin of error for global temperature in recent years is in the order of +/-0.05C, so anything within 0.1C is considered statistically the same; for such a change, the U.S. would have to be 6.3C/11.3F warmer than average, nearly triple what it actually has been so far this year.