It’s never been this hot in the United States.
We just finished the hottest year on record. For the contiguous United States, the 12 months between July 2011 and the end of June marked the hottest year since record keeping began in 1895. Nationally, the average temperature was 56 degrees Fahrenheit -- 3.2 degrees above the long-term average.
This won’t come as news to the folks of Red Willow County, Nebraska, where temperatures reached 115 degrees on June 26 -- shattering the previous record set in 1932 -- or any of more than 100 other places that saw their hottest days ever during just the past three weeks.
It’s not exactly a scoop to the 76 percent of the country where corn is roasting to dust and lakes are baking to chalk amid drought or abnormally dry conditions.
Nor will it much surprise the thousands of Americans who have fled their homes in advance of wildfires that have burned more than 2.6 million acres of land so far this year. (See "Climate Change Fuels the Perfect Firestorm.")
News that we’ve just wrapped up the hottest 12 months on record, though, does put this summer’s heat, drought, and wildfires into perspective, at a time when conservative pundits like George Will are shrugging their shoulders and asking: so what?
“How do we explain the heat? One word: summer,” Will said Sunday on ABC News. “We’re having some hot weather. Get over it.”
Some summers are hotter than others, falling within a range of what scientists call “natural variability,” which can be influenced by global weather patterns. There are many reasons, also, for the kinds of wildfires, and drought we’re seeing this summer. All, though, are part of the wider pattern that climate scientists have been predicting for decades and documenting for years, as the burning of fossil fuels builds up heat-trapping carbon in our atmosphere.
“You’re watching climate change in action,” Kevin Trenberth, distinguished senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, told me. “These are just the sort of things we expect to see as the climate gets warmer. To some extent, these things are going to continue to happen.”
Get over it? Get used to it might be more accurate.
“This is not your grandfather’s summer,” said Trenberth, whose office was forced to evacuate for two days last month as wildfires raged within 1.5 miles of the facility. “This is the summer of the future.”
In just the past three weeks, at least 46 deaths have been blamed on the heat.
How hot? It was 118 degrees in Norton County, Kansas, on June 28. Wait a minute -- 118 degrees? You leave a bayberry candle on your screened porch in that weather, and it melts like a stick of butter.
Amid the longest stretch of triple-digit days since 1930 in the nation’s capital, officials blamed a “heat kink” in a commuter rail line for forcing a train off the tracks July 6. Roads are buckling from the heat in Wisconsin. Yes, Wisconsin.
“Evidence supporting the existence of climate change is pummeling the United States this summer,” Amy Goodman wrote in a July 5 column for the Guardian, “from the mountain wildfires of Colorado to the recent ‘derecho’ storm that left at least 23 dead and 1.4 million people without power from Illinois to Virginia.”
A ‘derecho’ is a powerful line of thunderstorms, supercharged by extreme heat, like the one that swept from Indiana to the coast of Delaware in 10 hours on June 29, packing gusts up to 80 miles per hour and toppling massive trees and telephone poles in its wake.
The kind of heat that fuels derechos has been in ample supply of late.
It was 113 degrees in Edgefield County, South Carolina, on the last day of June, and 112 degrees in Marshall County, Tennessee, on the second of July. Both of those scorchers broke the local all-time highs, part of more than 140 records shattered in 115 different places during late June and early July, according to the National Climatic Data Center, which maintains the largest weather data archive in the world.
Run a finger across a map along a line from northern California to the top of Ohio. Most of the country south of that line is experiencing serious drought, with little relief in sight. “The near-term forecast doesn’t bode very well,” Mark Svoboda, climatologist with the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, told me. “July and August are the hottest and driest months of the year.”
Across much of the heartland, lakes are drying up, crops are withering, and farming communities are getting hammered, from the cornfields of Nebraska to the pecan groves of Georgia. “There’s a lot of praying,” Illinois Farm Bureau spokesman John Hawkins told the New York Times last week. “These 100-degree temperatures are just sucking the life out of everything.”
Moreover, the warming trend is global. Worldwide, land surface temperatures were 2.18 degrees above the historical average in May. It was the second-hottest May since record keeping began 132 years ago, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Last year was the 35th year in a row that annual global temperatures exceeded the 20th century average. The 11 years since 2001 all rank among the 13 hottest since 1880.
Hot weather, early snowmelt, and persistent drought have combined to create tinderbox conditions across much of the country. By July 9, 30,495 wildfires had burned 2.6 million acres nationwide, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, and there are more than two months of hot, dry summer conditions ahead.
The amount of forest and other land burned so far this year is in line with the 10-year average, but the average has risen 80 percent over the past decade.
Many factors contribute to wildfires. Experts, though, have been warning for years that global climate change is making matters worse. (See "How the West Was Lost.")
“The effects of climate change will continue to result in greater probability of longer and bigger fire seasons, in more regions of the nation,” states the 2009 Quadrennial Fire Review, a joint document produced every four years by the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, and the National Association of State Foresters. “What has already been realized in the past five years -- shorter, wetter winters and warmer, drier summers, larger amounts of total fire on the landscape, more large wildfires -- will persist and probably escalate.”
Even if we’re able to insulate ourselves from the worst effects of fires, drought and heat waves -- for a while, at least --- we’re not much likely to just “get over it,” as some might wish.
“We will have to live with the consequences of the carbon dioxide we’ve already put up there,” Trenberth explained. “While humans can hide in our air-conditioned houses, the trees and the ecosystems can’t.”