This Weather Is What Global Warming Looks Like

Did you know it’s been really hot this summer? Perhaps you noticed it, oh, anytime you’ve stepped outside of your door in New York City these last couple of weeks. (That’s assuming you have a decent cooling system jerryrigged; otherwise, you’ve noticed it every single second of every single day and wondered why you ever doubted the existence of hell.) Well, scientists are now pointing out that all the weird and warm weather we’ve been noticing this summer looks an awful lot like what the effects of global warming were expected to look like.Â Â

For instance, in addition to the crazy heat we’ve been suffering through lately, there have been wildfires (over 2.1 million acres in the U.S), droughts (two thirds of the country), huge downpours, and a freak windstorm known as a derecho (D.C, you know what we’re talking about on that one). It is, to say the least, an eventful summer for weathermen.

Scientists won’t come out and say that this is global warming, because scientists are cautious types and it’s way too early to make that call on whether this is correlation or causation that’s making the collective backs of our sweaty thighs stick to our chairs, but it’s not great thatÂ 3,215 daily temperature records were set in June alone. And that of the 40,000 temperature records the country has set this year, just 6,000 have been cold related. “This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level,”Â Jonathan Overpeck, a professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona, told the Associated Press. “The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about.” It’s probably not an I-told-you-so with much pleasure attached. Unless that dude really, really likes sweating.

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