More than 2,000 highest max temperature records across the USA were
broken in July 2012. Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Climatic Data Center)
No, I won't ask whether it's hot enough for ya, as I'm sure you've heard that many times before. But how about if we ask you the next best thing: so, do you believe in global warming now?
Bryan Walsh of TIME Magazine wrote:
This isn't to say that climate change is directly causing the extreme heat that's been suffocating much of the U.S. this summer. Fingerprinting a single extreme weather event as evidence of global warming — be it a heat wave, a major storm, a drought or a flood — take years of intensive study, though researchers are beginning to make those connections. A 2011 study in Nature made waves by linking rising instances of extreme precipitation in the second half of the 20th century to man-made global warming — the kind of large-scale survey that needs to be done to make the climate change case authoritatively. The sheer number of factors that influence individual weather events is immense. But we do have a pretty good idea of what climate change will look like in the years to come — if it continues uninterrupted — and it will look a lot like this summer, this spring and this winter. "The frequency of hot days and hot periods has already increased and will increase further," says Oppenheimer. "What we're seeing fits into the pattern you would expect."
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