After this past summer’s sizzling heat, many people will undoubtedly welcome the coming of winter in the northern hemisphere. Colder weather, though seasonally temporary, will be refreshing. Australians, and others in the southern hemisphere, may not be looking forward to coming summer.
Globally, July 2019 was the hottest July and month on record. The entire summer in the Northern Hemisphere, where 90 percent of Earth’s population lives, turned out to be the hottest summer on record. The heat records just kept piling up. This left no doubt that the entire planet is warming and now reaching levels felt by millions and clearly affecting life. The Arctic bore the biggest brunt, with Alaska setting all-time heat records and the Greenland ice cap melting at alarming rates (over two days, enough ice melted to cover Denmark with two meters of water).
In addition, a trio of new scientific papers showed that the current warming is unprecedented over the past 2,000 years, that the rate of warming exceeds anything seen in the past two millennia, and that while past climate epochs weren’t globally simultaneous, this current one is. The entire planet is heating.