The Reckoning
By Bill McKibben
If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven’t convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke 2,132 high temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the northern hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7x10 to the 99th, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.
Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the “largest temperature departure from average of any season on record,” and was part of a 12-month stretch of heat so statistically rare, according to one calculation, that absent global warming we wouldn’t see it again till 46,298 AD. The same day, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet’s history.
Not that our leaders seemed to notice.
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