Must-Read: Courtesy of Erik Loomis of Lawyers, Guns, and Money: Yes, it is hot. But it’s a dry heat. Why do you ask?:
: No, Now This Is Officially the Hottest Earth Has Ever Been [UPDATING]: “It’s getting pretty hard to keep track of all the heat records we’ve been breaking recently, isn’t it?…
…Don’t worry, we’re here to help. NOAA’s latest data reveal we just wrapped up the hottest winter the U.S. has ever seen—just like last summer (which also broke its season record), last year (another record-smasher), the year before that, and a whole chain of recent individual hottest months, knocking each out one after the other like dominoes. It’s almost like there’s a pattern in all this, isn’t it? Almost as though our planet was locked into some sort of terrible, human-induced cycle of gradual warming…. Anyway, we’ll be back to update you here next month (or shortly thereafter)….
UPDATE April 19, 2:12 pm: Sorry, February, you thought you were pretty hot, but March laughs at your attempts at hot temperatures. According to NOAA’s latest data, the new hottest month ever was this March, marking the 11th consecutive month in a row that record has been broken…. UPDATE May 18, 1:15 pm: Congratulations, humanity—we did it! (It, in this case, being cooking our planet into a slow rolling boil.) NOAA’s latest climate update reveals that we just wrapped up the hottest April ever recorded. That gives us twelve consecutive months—a full year—in which every single month set a new temperature record. Will next month make thirteen? Probably! See you then, my warm friends. UPDATE June 20, 8:45 am: And here we are at lucky number 13 of the hottest consecutive months ever recorded—if by ‘luck’ you mean an unstoppably rising heat wave, accompanied by an unsavory mix of both droughts and floods. (Note: This is no one’s definition of luck.)